It took her five minutes-with an audience watching-to get on the stage, and the chair cracked under her weight. She tells an excruciating story about a publishing event where, as a featured author, she was expected to climb onto a stage and sit on a “tiny” wooden chair.
Gay’s professional success and measure of fame haven’t made people any slower to judge or quicker to acknowledge her needs. It’s difficult to find clothes that fit, and she’s constantly forced to navigate a world that seems designed to punish her “unruly” body: “I cram my body into seats that are not meant to accommodate me,” she writes, “and an hour or two or more later, when I stand up and the blood rushes, the pain is intense.” Now in her early forties, and despite decades of trying to lose weight, she’s large enough to need two seats when she flies coach.
“My memories of the after are scattered, fragmentary,” she writes, “but I do clearly remember eating and eating and eating so I could forget, so my body would become so big it could never be broken again.”īy the time she was in high school Gay was obese, and she has remained so. She traces her decades of struggle with her body to the trauma of being raped, dividing her life-in some sense, her very self-into before and after. Out of some mixture of shame and shock, she kept the rape a secret from her devoted and loving parents for many years, though other children around her knew about it at the time and tormented her for being a “slut.” Gay, who is well known as a fiction writer and feminist cultural critic, has publicly acknowledged the rape before, but she confronts it very directly here, conveying its breathtaking cruelty in a way that’s tough to read but makes the enduring aftermath fully understandable. Gay was gang-raped when she was twelve years old, lured to an isolated cabin by a boyfriend, who led the assault.
In a culture that relentlessly shames fat people, it’s an act of courage for anyone Gay’s size simply to write honestly and without apology about her physical existence, but she goes much farther here, confronting the traumatic roots of her condition and revealing her ongoing struggle to make some kind of peace with her body and with her own emotional and physical hunger. The book explores, frankly and in detail, what it’s like to live in a body the world feels entitled to judge. Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body tells the story of why and how she became morbidly obese.