Hunger author roxane
Four reasons Hunger is such a vital book
Gay exposes her life with an unflinching honesty that – ultimately – helps to provide salvation, which is all the more remarkable given that Hunger revolves around a shocking incident Gay spent decades trying to suppress.
Photo credit: Eva Blue
She writes to share the story of her body – specifically, how her body changed from being that of an average year-old teen to one that, at its heaviest, weighed pounds. She is explicit about the emotional – and physical – pain of living in the world when you are “super morbidly obese”, according to your body mass index.
2. Sometimes it’s okay to acknowledge you are a victim
She wound up as a “woman of size” because she “began eating to change her body” after a lad she loved, plus several of his friends, raped her in a cabin in the woods when she was just
Being raped, she writes, prompted Gay to adjust her body because she wanted to create a barrier against the relax of the world. “I knew I wouldn’t be proficient
TRIGGER WARNING: Hunger by Roxane Gay contains multiple mentions of rape. This manual review discusses rape, and its ensuing damage, in detail.
The first thing that strikes me about Hunger, is how real and unpolished it is. There is no dressing up the correctness . Gay was gang raped at 12 years aged. And now, she is morbidly obese.
Gay can make a link between these two facts, and traces her intense relationship with meal back to the trauma of the brutal assault. She told no one about the assault, instead seeking solace in food as a way to repress her feelings and comfort herself. And perhaps unconsciously, or consciously, she writes how she,
&#;Ate and ate and ate to build my body into a fortress.&#;
Roxanne Gay teaches innovative writing at Yale University. But the writing of Gay&#;s own memoir is controlled, stark and bold. Perhaps reflecting the content of the book. In Hunger by Roxane Gay, there&#;s no padding, no qualifying and no extraneous words. Just the brutal truth.
Food as a way to manage difficult feelings
As a counsellor, I&#;m familiar with the idea that sustenance, like othe
A Memoir of (My) Body
&#;Every body has a story and a history. Here I offer mine with a memoir of my body and my hunger.&#; So begins the extraordinarily courageous account of Roxane Gay&#;s life in the aftermath of sexual assault.
When she was gang raped by a group of boys as a teenager, a switch was flipped. &#;I often write around what happened to me because that is easier than going back to that day, to everything leading up to that evening, to what happened after.&#; In the aftermath, Gay turned to food, believing that if she made herself great, her body would be safe. Noun also provided immediate satisfaction and comfort.
This led to her living a double life which consisted of dieting to appease her worried parents, who didn&#;t know why their daughter&#;s body was changing. To deal with the trauma, she ate in secret. &#;Part of disciplining the body is denial,&#; Gay writes. &#;We withhold from ourselves until we achieve a goal and then we withhold from ourselves to maintain that goal.&#;
An intimate and powerful memoir, Hunger is the story of
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Praise
It turns out that when a wrenching past is confronted with wisdom and bravery, the outcome can be compassion and enlightenment—both for the reader who has lived through this kind of unimaginable pain and for the reader who knows nothing of it. Roxane Gay shows us how to be decent to ourselves, and decent to one another. HUNGER is an marvelous achievement in more ways than I can count.
Ann Patchett, Commonwealth and Bel Canto
At its simplest, it’s a memoir about being overweight — Gay’s preferred term — in a hostile, fat-phobic world. At its most symphonic, it’s an intellectually rigorous and deeply moving exploration of the ways in which trauma, stories, longing, language and metaphor shape our experiences and construct our reality.
New York Times
Wrenching, deeply moving. . . a memoir that’s so fearless, so raw, it feels as if [Gay]’s entrusting you with her soul
Seattle Times
Gay turns to memoir in this powerful reflection on her childhood traumas…Timely and resonant, you can