Gay’s more universal message combined with excerpts of her own personal life experiences makes for an extremely powerful book that I only wish everyone would read and learn from.
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I may not have much in common with Roxane Gay, but yet at the same time, I do – because we are both women and face so many of the same societal struggles. There were entire chapters in Hunger that resonated so strongly with me and my own life experience. I am weary of all our sad stories – not hearing them, but that we have these stories to tell, that there are so many. And yet, it’s also not surprising since we live in a culture where victims of rape are often blamed and rapists protected. It’s stunning and also heartbreaking to learn that she did not allow anyone else to know what happened to her for so many years. Roxane Gay opens up about the brutal gang rape she experienced when she was barely a teenager and how food and the act of eating became therapeutic in dealing with the trauma. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. This is what most girls are taught-that we should be slender and small. In Hunger, Gay has chosen to lay bare the darkest parts of her life to open up a dialogue about how things like gender roles and sexual violence can have such a long-lasting impact on a person’s life in ways many of us can’t even begin to imagine. Roxane Gay may insist throughout her memoir that she is not courageous or brave, but I would beg to differ. The story of my life is wanting, hungering, for what I cannot have or, perhaps, wanting what I dare not allow myself to have. ROXANE GAY: I didn’t really have a methodology beyond what spoke to me and what I thought would be relevant right now. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
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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. In Hunger, she explores her own 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. The words of this chapter were some of the most affecting I have ever read.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. In a chapter towards the end, she details how she has located her attacker- not too difficult of course with modern technology – and her fantasy of confronting him.
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The book reads as a series of short chapters/essays, mostly in chronological order, of her different experiences and horrors as a fat person, one who is dealing with trauma. 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.” “Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it. She felt that if no one wanted to touch her she was safe: Much of her story is about living as a fat person in this world, including the embarrassment, the despair, the hopelessness.īut her memoir is also about WHY she is fat.Ī victim of a brutal sexual assault, she is fat because she used food and being fat as a shield from people who may hurt her again. “When I use the world I am not insulting myself. The mind is inherently embodied, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote in 1999. She uses this word – “fat” – about herself over and over. HUNGER A Memoir of (My) Body By Roxane Gay 306 pp. Roxane Gay, also the author of bestselling Bad Feminist: Essays, is fat, very fat. But because I loved the book and want other people to read it (and I do have a book blog – ha!!!) I will give it a shot.
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The story was so powerful and HERS that it is daunting to attempt to reflect upon it.
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The author, whose much-celebrated works, Bad Feminist (2014) and Difficult Women (2017) made her a hero for.
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Because Roxane Gay writes with such raw honesty in Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body it will be difficult for me to write a blog post in response. Roxane Gay has a knack for turning uncomfortable truths into necessary reading.