The first thing I am going to tell about Hunger is that it is a memoir written by someone who´s had a very difficult life.
Please read that book before Hunger, but make sure you read them both. When I was reading Bad Feminist, the first piece of her writing I ever got, I felt as if I was not reading at all, but I was chatting with someone I had known for a long time. The first time I read her I was completely taken by her intimate, friendly prose that is academic, concise, clear and very professional, but still very close. She received critical acclaim for her work and was in everyone´s mouth the entire year. Her writing is as powerful as she is and took the world by surprise. She only came into the public eye with her majestic dual debut in 2014 with An Untamed State, which is a novel and Bad Feminist, a compilation of essays. She is a source of inspiration for us all and might be the first step into a new world of understanding. F at is more than a feminist issue – as this extraordinary memoir by novelist and essayist Roxane Gay reveals.Roxane Gay was born in 1974 and is a New York Times Best-selling author, university teacher, editor, commentator, influencer, feminist and one of the strongest women I have ever seen in my life. Gay’s last book, Bad Feminist, became a New York Times bestseller and revealed her to be a writer unfazed by inconvenient truths and a champion of women – especially gay and black women. Hunger tells a story that must have been as hard to write as it is disturbing to read. She does not duck from telling us, early on, that at 6ft 3in tall, she weighed, at her heaviest, 577 pounds: “That is a staggering number, one I hardly believe, but at one point, that was the truth of my body.” She does – and does not – know, she says, how things got so out of hand. To some extent, she is on the side of Susie Orbach. She remarks with devastating simplicity: “This is what most girls are taught – that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space.” But her book is a bid to take up space in another sense, to tell a story that wants to shrink into invisibility yet needs to be told. Terrible to think of a 12-year-old child willing herself to go on as though nothing had happened A personal story, with implications for us all. “Something terrible happened,” she writes. “That something terrible broke me.” Aged 12, she was gang-raped by “a boy I thought I loved, and a group of his friends”. They were in an abandoned hunting cabin in the woods in Omaha, Nebraska, where no one but the boys could hear her screams.
She drags her account on to the page – faltering, incomplete, unsensational.
“They were boys who were not yet men but knew, already, how to do the damage of men.” One reads about the unthinkable abuse she suffered – the boy holding her wrists and spitting in her face after raping her is a particularly upsetting detail – and feels as shaken as if one were directly witnessing what she describes.
Yet this is no attention-seeking misery memoir. The book is an attempt to see fat in its complexity, its contrariness – as potentially more than a physical problem to be overcome. And although Gay regrets she is unable to go as far as the campaigners who rejoice in their size, she does want us to rethink what fatness can mean.įor Gay, overeating was, for a while, her solution. She makes it persuasively plain that fatness began as a response to rape. The fatter her body became, the safer she felt. Fatness was home in a game of chase: “a place where no one can get you”.