Your body is constantly and prominently on display. When you’re overweight, your body becomes a matter of public record in many respects. They’re lazy.’ Instead, imagine if the starting point was ‘What has been hurt?’ or ‘What is frightening you?’ It is simple for people to look at an obese person and say ‘They have no willpower.
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Sometimes that comfort is found in drugs or alcohol. People who have suffered a trauma need comfort.
ROXANE GAY HUNGER REPETITIVE FREE
It has been thirty years and, inexplicably, I am still not free of it. ‘…I wish I could bury that story, somewhere deep where I might be free of it. In the case of Hunger, it was about the deep and lasting repercussions of sexual violence. Why did I lose momentum during this book? Parts of the second half were repetitive, particularly around her ongoing frustration, that she was ‘… extraordinarily visible but invisible.’ However, I tend to find a message in every memoir I read that stays with me. She observes that regardless of what she accomplishes, she will be ‘… fat, first and foremost.’ Although Gay speaks to her experience, the broader message is that obesity is an extraordinarily complex problem with no single cause and no single solution (despite what the lucrative diet industry would have people believe). The second half of the book uses Gay’s life experiences as a reference point for reflections on weight, the diet industry, body image, fat-shaming, and the practical challenges of being fat in a world that is not designed for obese people. The first half is devoted to her childhood and early adulthood, and is organised in chronological sequence. It’s broken into 88 chapters, some just a paragraph long. The book is an attempt at the ‘figuring out’. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than twenty years. I am still trying to figure my way out of it. However, she recognises the bind that she has put herself in, stating – I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure another such violation, and so I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away.
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Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it. Losing control of my body was a matter of accretion. I don’t know how things got so out of control, or I do. From the time of the rape onwards, Gay used food as ‘safety’, saying that she “…ate and ate and ate to build my body into a fortress.” An important element of Gay’s story is her gang rape at age 12, something she kept secret for decades. Gay tracks her physical and emotional state from childhood to the present. The subtitle of the book is ‘A Memoir of (My) Body’. You know when you first begin a book and you can’t put it down, and then other stuff gets in the way and you set the book aside for a few days, and then you pick it up again and wonder, ‘Was this the same book I was engrossed in a few days ago?’ That.