Gay was a gifted student, attending boarding school at Exeter and going on to study at Yale. I found ways to hide in plain sight, to keep feeding a hunger that could never be satisfied - the hunger to stop hurting.
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I was swallowing my secrets and making my body expand and explode. She describes how fear of her body’s weakness led her to disassociate and then, later, to overeat: Gay shared a healthy, open relationship with her parents but kept the incident to herself, and her attackers were never caught or prosecuted. At twelve, she writes, she was raped by a boy she knew from school, along with a group of his friends. Roughly chronological, the memoir begins with Gay as a girl in Omaha, the eldest child of Haitian immigrants. But I also knew that the things I was finding most difficult to write were probably the things that are more necessary to write.” “Vulnerability is very uncomfortable,” says Gay. For that reason, at 320 pages, Hunger is a relatively short book that could take a long time to read. In these disquieting confessions and the book’s many others, she conveys her recollections and sense impressions through taut, resonant, straightforward sentences. “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.” At her heaviest, Gay, who is six-foot-three, weighed 577 pounds. “Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it,” Gay writes. In Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, out this month, she has crafted a ferocious and unapologetic work about her relationship with her physical self and experience negotiating the world as, in Gay’s words, “a woman of size.” As a child, Gay was the victim of sexual violence, a topic she has mined elsewhere in her writing here she explains how the incident led her to gain weight as a defense mechanism. In that latter sense, the 42-year-old Gay’s latest effort might very well be her rawest and most revealing. She is a novelist, critic, essayist, comic-book author, screenwriter, and memoirist who has proved unafraid to explore and expose even the most upsetting parts of her personal history in writing. The New York Times bestselling author is a rare mainstream crossover, both incisive and remarkably prolific, producing boundary-pushing work across a range of genres.
#ROXANE GAY HUNGER DIFFICULT WOMEN 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.By now, the release of a new book by Roxane Gay has become a cultural event. 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.
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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. I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.' 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 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.