Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

This was one of the most emotionally challenging listening experiences I’ve had. Not because the writing lacked anything. It was too powerful, too raw. I paused it often, unsure if I could keep going. Not because it wasn’t good, but because it was too much. Roxane Gay’s voice is steady and filled with nuance. There’s a richness to the way she shares her story that made it feel like I was hearing her read pages of a diary I wasn’t entirely sure I had the right to read. I hated how much of this I related to. I hated that it had to be written. I’m grateful that it was. This isn’t a book I can recommend to everyone. It’s too personal, too heavy, but it might be for you.

A dear friend of mine died two years ago. I never learned the cause of death, but it was quite possibly related to her morbid obesity.

Reading Gay's memoir, I was overwhelmed by an acute awareness of of my own ignorance. I came away with a stark sense of how little I knew about my friend and the issues—emotional, experiential—that were part of the story of her body. No doubt my distress and distain, that surfaced from time to time, helped her keep her story to herself. Why trust such personal history to someone who doesn't affirm all of who you are?

Reading this book, I had to confront the truth that I carried, still carry, judgments and criticisms of "unruly bodies" that I've never questioned. Until now. The writing—vulnerable, show more thoughtful, honest—will continue to challenge me for some time to come. show less

The most forthcoming and honest memoir I think I've ever read.

Roxane Gay enumerates her struggles with having what she terms an "unruly body." Which essentially means she is very, very obese.

The way in which she tells her story is so straightforward, so from the heart, and reads so true. I can't imagine it was easy to put her real feelings out there for the whole world to see. Nonetheless, that is what she did. I have a weakness for sugar and great food myself, so I've always felt empathetic toward overweight people, but she is more than overweight, and I really felt her pain. This book isn't some weight loss success story. It's about body image and the difficulties of operating in society with a big body. It's also about identity and show more how one's identity can become subsumed by one's non conforming body.

Her writing is simple, pure, and powerful. I really can't wait to read more from her. show less

I expected the reading of Hunger to be difficult because I've spent my whole life dealing with weight issues, and their accompanying self-image problems. I was right. Within the first few chapters, I'd broken down in tears several times because what she was saying touched painful places within me. I would nod, and cry, and think "I'm not alone!" and feel somehow stronger because of it.
And then she'd talk about other experiences that I failed to relate to, and I listened from a distance, appreciating her honesty, but not connecting in any meaningful way. Gay and I come at our shared problems via very different routes. I have never been raped as she was, but I come from a genetic background of self-medication and severe weight issues. (My show more biological grandmother ended her life as a shut-in due to her weight. A distant ancestor, who was known in his youth as "The Wolf," became "The Fat" as he grew old.) but we've ended up in the same place, and that is the significant, even central fact of both of our lives.

What is universal here is the pain we can suffer at the hands of other people. Like Gay, I've been abused my whole life because of my weight. I've been called names, shoved, spit on, laughed at, punched, blamed for everything that's wrong in the world, and more. Unlike Gay, who is still young enough that these things can hurt her, at my age I have ceased to care what anyone else thinks of me.

Most of the time.

And that's why her story felt so devastating to me, I think. It should be painful to any human being with an ounce of empathy, even if they've never been the object of prejudice. It's all well and good for me to tell myself that bullies are sad, fearful people, but that doesn't always translate, you know? It's all well and good to say, I'm past concerns about how I move through this life, but I'm not. I have to plan ahead for social gatherings, especially now as age and injury have closed down my world even further.

As Gay points out, and I know well, the world is full of people who are anxious to tell you how to fix these problems. "Just lose weight!" they say. (Oh my gosh, why didn't I THINK of that? How silly of me!) "Just eat less!" (Thanks, but I have spent so much time starving myself that there was a time when I could gain weight on a 600 calorie per day diet. You live on 600 calories for a while and tell me how that feels.) This is like telling someone with depression to just cheer up, or someone with a broken leg to just walk it off. If there really was an easy fix... well if there was we might not all be thin because there'd be no real stigma attached to something that could be changed the way we change our clothes. We might be able to be who we are instead of who we are told we should be.

And that's one of the most critical issues within Gay's book, the control that is so often exerted over women and their bodies. I've known for most of my life that fat men don't come in for half the abuse that fat women do. But in a world where women's bodies remain commodities to be traded in, everyone thinks they have something to say about how women look, about the space they take up in this world. This is at the core of Hunger, and it makes Gay's story both uglier and more pertinent. You don't have to be a fat woman to have a total stranger tell you your body is somehow wrong or bad, you just have to be female, and minding your own damn business.

I hope that readers will understand what it is Gay is saying here, not just about being fat in a world that values only thinness, but about being female in a world that values us as objects, not people. Hunger isn't just about Roxane Gay. It's not just about being fat. It's not just about being different or challenging society's expectations. It is about being female in a world where everything you are is public property, and where you are expected to take up as little space as possible.

And now I feel very sad and angry again, and am going to stop writing. Read this book. Believe it. show less

An extremely brave memoir about body image, food issues, sexual violence, and all the things that feed into those issues—in other words, basically everything. Gay's narrative voice and her tremendous courage and vulnerability make this a very readable book in spite of the fact that it's terribly uncomfortable in all the ways that it should be uncomfortable.

A memoir about trauma and fatness which was painful to read both in the ways that it intersected with my experiences and those that it didn't. I find it interesting how many reviews describe the book as repetitive and thus bad, whereas I understood the circling back as a means of showing the compounding nature of trauma. A lot of readers seem to want Roxane Gay to have finished in some upward trajectory of a "weight-loss journey"—for her to perform some complicated feat of gymnastics that would let her bootstrap her way out of her own body—but as she says in Hunger's opening pages, this "is not a story of triumph". It's neither a How To nor a How Not To book. It's far more mixed than that, as indeed are some of my feelings about show more Hunger—but what is more fitting for a book about hunger than for me to have mixed feelings about it? show less

Roxane Gay's book about what it's like to live in the world as an obese woman approaches the experience from both universal and starkly personal angles. She's so honest and unflinching in her examination of her own weight, as well as why she is fat, that the book is often difficult to read; I felt that I really shouldn't be privy to such personal information. But Gay is unable to not be completely open, and it's that rawness that makes this book so powerful.

Gay ties her very personal experience to the wider one of how society treats larger women, pulling from her own life to demonstrate how ill-equipped and judgmental we are of people who we perceive as lacking control, and especially of women who take up more space than they should. show more Gay is also a tall woman, at 6'3" making her even more conspicuous than she would be at an average height, making ordinary things difficult, from airline seats to finding clothes.

While she was on a book tour for this book, she traveled to Australia and did an interview with a website which subsequently wrote an article about the unique problems accommodating Gay's size posed for them, from having to find a sturdy chair to the onerous task of checking how many pounds the elevator could carry. It was amazing how very much a publication which intended to be sympathetic missed the mark and the whole sordid tale proved Gay's points. It should be noted that had this company planned an interview with a man of similar size, they would have gone about their preparations with a great deal less hysteria and certainly never considered it fodder for an article. show less