One of the ways that Gay understands her body is as a response to those who violated it. A Swedish meta-analysis of studies with 112,000 participants concluded that “being subjected to abuse during childhood entails a markedly increased risk of developing obesity as an adult.” The Centers for Disease Control and Protection’s ongoing ACE Study suggests that over six million obese adults in America suffered from some form of abuse in their childhood, whether it be physical, sexual, verbal, or emotional. A 2013 analysis with 57,000 participants concluded that women who experienced physical and/or sexual abuse during their childhood were twice as likely to have food addictions than those who did not report and childhood abuse. Gay writes of the years following her brutal assault, “I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe.” What she is describing here is not an uncommon response to trauma. Gay describes how it feels to live in a body that is an everyday reminder of her rape, but also celebrate the ways that she has grown and thrived in her body that are separate from her victimhood. She rails against acquaintances who act like calling oneself fat is an insult, like being fat and beautiful/kind/intelligent is somehow a balance that cannot exist. She acknowledges the complicated duality of accepting her body as it is but also desiring to change it. While Gay lost control of her appetite, she gained control of the way she presented herself in the world, gained the ability to make herself invisible to those who could harm her. Gay deals largely in paradoxes, discussing how her weight gain was both a loss of control and a means of gaining control. Gay is prevented by shame from reporting her rape to law enforcement or her loved ones, and thus a vicious cycle of misunderstanding begins, where her family becomes concerned with her weight gain and lacks the information necessary to understand the source of her pain. She began reading and writing as a form of escape, a way to control her narrative and imagine a life separate from the trauma that followed her everywhere in the real world.
She writes of her life in two parts, before and after the assault, before and after the shame and guilt that forced Gay to draw into herself, to protect herself from further attack. One who took advantage of her body repeatedly before leading her to a shed in the woods and encouraging a group of friends to brutally gang rape her when she was only twelve. Gay writes of her childhood, growing up in an upper-middle class family with stable and loving parents, before her innocence was robbed by a boy whom she thought she loved. Gay makes it clear that her memoir will not be an inspirational weight-loss story, a victorious tale of how she overcame her struggles with obesity-but rather a reflection on her ongoing struggle to feel at home in a body that is “unruly”. From the very first pages, it is clear that Hunger is an incredibly intimate memoir, one that required a great deal of emotional introspection from its author.
HUNGER ROXANE GAY EARLY RELEASE HOW TO
With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved-in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.“When I was twelve years old I was raped and then I ate and ate and ate to build my body into a fortress,” writes Roxane Gay in her 2017 bestseller, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. In Hunger, she explores her past-including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life-and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself. As a woman who describes her own body as "wildly undisciplined," Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health.
I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe." I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. "I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.