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I am constantly thinking about my body and its effect on my emotions. It has been a really interesting experience, making weight loss and my body a focus of my attention more than at any other time in my life. This year, I have lost 30 pounds while doing Weight Watchers.
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This is a story of someone who recognizes her struggles and wants to overcome them and yet understands that they provide her with comfort and feelings of relative safety. This is a story of a fat woman who wants to accept herself and also does not want to be fat anymore. This is not a story of simple fat acceptance. However, the content was challenging and I appreciated that. Most of the time, it didn’t really feel like writing as much as just getting the words on the page. For some reason, the writing just didn’t connect with me. To be honest, I didn’t like this book as much as I anticipated I would. Hunger explores Gay’s feelings about the trauma she experienced, her family, and her relationships, as well as the burden of moving through this world as a fat person and her desire to lose weight. She traces the story of her body from the time she was gang raped at age 12 by some boys from school, acknowledging that she purposely gained weight in order to protect herself. She is a very large woman, six-foot and three inches tall, having weighed, at one point, over five hundred pounds. Hunger is the story of Roxane Gay’s body (as you might have guessed from the title). I also follow her on Twitter and enjoy her feminism, humor, and authenticity. I was familiar with Gay’s writing from my old favorite (now defunct) blog, The Toast. With that in mind, I chose a memoir for book number two: Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, by Roxane Gay. In an effort to stave off that possible consequence, I’m planning to follow my reading whims this year, while purposefully mixing it up. I don’t want to be so burned out from having to read that I don’t want to read anymore. I don’t want reading to feel like an obligation this year. I had a very book-heavy course load in college, and during that time, I had little desire to read anything for fun. It’s an intensely honest book, and there are many passages that are tough to read, but I think it’s a profoundly important narrative, and a perspective that was missing – conspicuously absent on reflection – in our world.I’ve been a little worried that this 50 book challenge is going to make reading a chore. The writing sometimes feels repetitious, but it reflects the near-constant frustrations, negative messaging, and indignity that she lives with in a world both fixated on evaluating, monitoring and reporting on her body, while also refusing to accommodate her. Eating therefore becomes a way for Roxane to feel safe.
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She is unable to say anything to her family, and processes this trauma on her own. Then at age 12, she is the victim of a sickening, monstrous rape, which destroys any sense of security she once had, while also bringing her overwhelming, life-long shame. Her weight gain hinges on a before and after before, she had a trouble-free childhood playing with her brothers and feeling deeply loved and safe with her family. Even her father – who would clearly do anything to support her –naively says things like “I am only telling you what no one else will,” when what he says is what the world tells her – forcefully and contemptuously – every day.Įating for Roxane is something of a coping mechanism, which seems to have tipped into a blurred act of compulsion, too. Many of the aspects of her daily experiences should (and do) provoke empathy, not pity. Unlike most personal stories about weight, this is not a ‘triumph’ narrative about her losing weight or conquering her ‘unruly’ body.Īs a super obese woman (someone with a BMI of 50 or more), Gay details the daily intrusions and humiliating ordeals that she endures from shopping for food (strangers being so brazen as to remove items from her shopping cart), clothes (where options are incredibly limited), boarding a plane (and dealing with non-compatible belt extenders and casual cruelty from other passengers or attendants), going to a restaurant (where careful investigations need to happen in advance to determine whether chairs have fixed armrests), walking down the street (where her body is treated like a public space itself – highly visible but invisible – bumped into, stepped on, shoved aside), even going to the doctor’s office (where she deals with condescension and dehumanization).
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Hunger is partly what it’s like to be overweight in a fat-phobic world, but more than that, it’s a memoir of Roxane Gay’s specific experience, what her body has gone through, and she’s not speaking for anyone but herself.