Hunger by Roxane Gay
A Memoir of (My) Body
“Every body has a story and a history. Here I offer mine with a memoir of my body and my hunger.” So begins the extraordinarily courageous account of Roxane Gay’s life in the aftermath of sexual assault.
When she was gang raped by a group of boys as a teenager, a switch was flipped. “I often write around what happened to me because that is easier than going back to that day, to everything leading up to that day, to what happened after.” In the aftermath, Gay turned to food, believing that if she made herself big, her body would be safe. Food also provided immediate satisfaction and comfort.
This led to her living a double life which consisted of dieting to appease her worried parents, who didn’t know why their daughter’s body was changing. To deal with the trauma, she ate in secret. “Part of disciplining the body is denial,” Gay writes. “We withhold from ourselves until we achieve a goal and then we withhold from ourselves to maintain that goal.”
An intimate and powerful memoir, Hunger is the story of a young girl who survived an unspeakable act of violence that changed the course of her future. It is a story of how we, as a society, perceive others who do not fit within our narrow, and often unattainable standards. Above all, this serves a reminder of our disregard for personal boundaries, our misunderstanding of trauma, and how deeply past experiences can impact one’s life.
Roxane Gay is the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist; the novel An Untamed State, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize; the New York Times bestselling memoir Hunger; and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, for which she also writes the “Work Friend” column, she has written for Time, McSweeney’s, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, and Oxford American, among many other publications. Her work has also been selected for numerous Best anthologies, including Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018 and Best American Mystery Stories 2014. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. In 2018 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and holds the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University’s Institute for Women’s Leadership.
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