Hunger - Roxane Gay
“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.”
- Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
I read Hunger my sophomore year of high School shortly after reading her New York Times Best Seller Bad Feminist. Roxane Gay is easily one of my favorite authors for her raw and complete honesty regarding her experiences as a woman of color who has attested to a few of the most traumatizing involvements of life. Hunger is also easily one of the hardest writings I have ever engaged in. It is both difficult to reflect on this book and to talk about it without fear of doing it an injustice to its art. However, it is impossible to talk of modern representation and normalizing raw youth experiences without the mentioning of a single Roxane Gay publication.
Without much for-telling because if any book is to be taken from this website - it’s this one, I present to you one of the most honorable mentions I could be so grateful to have engaged in. As distressing as it was to read, Hunger tells a myriad of stories that must have been much more difficult to write. The memoir commences with Roxane’s eating disorder as a 6ft 3 woman weighing at her heaviest 577 pounds. Gay’s immediate writers approach to her body encompasses a series of traumas that formulate into a repressive eating habit and while she recognizes that the number of her weight is staggering, she begins with her weight as it is the complete truth to her body. While referring to the complexity of obesity, she refers back to Susie Orbach [author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue] and implies an excerpt of reality for people who suffer from eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
“This is what most girls are taught – that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space.”
- Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
The memoir asks for the reader to rethink fatness and to perceive weight as a byproduct of a hyper-masculine and misogynistic thrilled society. While the intricacy and disheartening experiences of Roxanne Gay come to surface in this book, it is impossible for me to share the harsh and absolute necessary read without the depiction of its entirety.
At age 12 Gay was brutally gang raped by peers from her class.
“They were boys who were not yet men but knew, already, how to do the damage of men.”
- Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
The specifics of the experience as well as the details of the aftermath are quite haunting in its writing - but it is the truth, and it is the bravery of a woman to describe the experiences of 1 out of every 3 women on the planet. For Gay, overeating was, for a while, her solution to shielding her pain and discomfort from the rest of the world. Gay conclusively states that her fatness was a responsive and defensive tactic to rape and it reverts back to the vital objective view that fatness, weight and body issues are indirect byproducts of male gaze. Fatness to Roxanne Gay was “a place where no one can get you”.
From early on women are taught to internalize their weight as a cosmetic foundation. Weight is a very significant part of the identity, if not, it defines identity in its entirety. Women are taught through media and peer speculation, that our value is measured by our sexual presence. As I mention “sexual presence” I am not solely defining our beings in terms of lust and eroticism, but our general place in society that was conceived by male preference. This includes our “responsibilities” as dutiful daughters, house-wives, our presence on media and our presence inside the heteronormative society.
Hunger illustrates the affects of the male gaze on the female body and in her book she explores how women can challenge the homogeneity of beauty standards. She truthfully tells of her identity, weight, bisexuality, blackness, intelligence and feminism and how platforming these characteristics and issues must be a necessary and difficult tool to dismantling the rampant sexism that exists inside media and culture.
I am not sure how to articulate this in a way that justices its work and truth, but please, if you haven’t, this is an absolute must read.