But in so many ways, I believe she is triumphant even in the face of her hunger. She is still learning and working and healing. She still doesn’t always feel secure and confident with herself and her body. We withhold from ourselves until we achieve a goal and then we withhold from ourselves to maintain that goal.”įrom the get-go Gay clarifies that Hunger is not a story of triumph over her body. We deny ourselves peace of mind by remaining ever vigilant over our bodies. I think plenty of readers will feel this way when reading Hunger and I can illustrate what I mean by sharing one of my favorite quotes from the book: But I know that despite the differences in our bodies and lived experiences, Gay’s writing on (her) body has touched me in ways that are personal to me. I don’t understand what living with the label of “super morbidly obese” is like. I know nothing of her body’s experience of violation in the worst of ways and at the tenderest of ages. In reflecting on how Gay’s memoir and experiences apply to me, I cannot pretend to know the truth of her body. Healing is a dance of forwards and backwards. In Hunger, Gay shows how healing is not linear or whole. That’s what healing from trauma, mental illness, and anything really, is truly like. Her healing wasn’t immediate it was intermittent, fragmented, and still ongoing despite it being years and years later. In her family she will always know love and support, even if they don’t completely understand her and all her decisions.Īnother one of my favorite facets of Hunger is that Gay is realistic about the process of healing. What was poignant and touching for me was despite her running away from Yale during her lost year, there remained the knowledge that she has and will always have a home. Her view of her family, especially her parents, reflects how I view and feel about my own and more so now that I am getting older. She knows and has always know that her parents only mean well. Yet Gay has been understanding, even where her parents and body intersect.
As a child of immigrants who knew a life different from her own, it was easy for her to get frustrated with her parents (and I’m sure at times, she was). Her parents were really concerned with her body, the weight she was gaining, the space her body was taking up. While she was growing up, her growing body was deemed “a family problem”. Her parents were Haitian immigrants who grew up with standards and ways of living different than her own. One of my favorite aspects of the book, and I suppose in Gay’s writing in general, is the tenderness with which she writes about her family. In the book she writes about several ways she has satiated that hunger throughout the years- her drama geek friend who was kind and only ever asked for her friendship Jon, a boyfriend from the Upper Peninsula during her grad school years people she’d find on internet chatrooms and particularly those from sexual abuse forums and her family. It is a metaphor for her loneliness and want of human connection that will make her feel safe and understood. Hunger is a metaphor her intense hunger symbolizes far more than her body’s cues to eat. She is so utterly vulnerable that readers won’t be able to help but feel vulnerable in reading her book as well.
Gay writes powerfully, conveying the full range of emotions she felt- palpable is her hurt, anger, fear, guilt, numbness, self-loathing, isolation, and loneliness. But as a woman, with the possibility of it happening to me and/or someone I love and the fact that so many women have had to experience that is horrifying. As a woman not directly affected by sexual assault, I can only go so far in understanding the author’s experience. When Gay was twelve years old, she was ganged raped by a boy she loved and his friends in a cabin in the woods behind her home.
I naively figured it would just be about her relationship with food. When I first picked up Hunger, I had no inkling that the book would involve Gay’s sexual assault. Hunger is a memoir of the whys of her body, of sexual assault and rape, trauma, guilt, loneliness, family, victimhood and survivorship, and the lifelong process of healing. Hunger is not only a memoir of physical hunger or the way Roxane Gay ate herself to fatness but why she did. Books end up in our hands at serendipitously perfect moments of our lives sometimes Hunger has been one of those books for me.