While I don’t believe in shaming people for not having read something, I am a little ashamed that Hunger is my first book by Roxane Gay. The good news is, I can finally say I’ve read a Roxane Gay book, and the even better news is, this won’t be my last.
If you’re not familiar with Hunger here is a brief rundown.
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. 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. 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.
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.
Roxane Gay is brave and strong and wildly impressive as a human and writer. This book exemplifies all of these things. I doubt I could ever write anything as honest and candid about myself or my body. After reading this book and reflecting on what it took to write this memoir, I am blown away by Gay’s willingness to get vulnerable.
Mostly the book revolves around Gay’s body. Gay is super morbidly obese, and much of the book focuses on how she got that way, and how she navigates the world, both figuratively and literally. She details her thoughts on TV shows like The Biggest Loser and walks us through her eating disorder, she even talks in detail about kinds of chairs and how they effect her body. The whole book serves as a reminder that we are all vastly different and our experiences and shape and color directly influence our world view.
While Gay and her body are very different from my own, we are both black women, and in that share some solidarity when it comes to the way we interact with the world. Gay is masterful in the way she uses her own story to bring the reader in and isolate them. She shares ideas that are at one moment highly relatable, and then she switches quickly to thoughts that are uniquely her own. This style of writing allows the reader to feel both close to and far away from the author, it is a thrilling, and surprisingly rare.
I listened to this as an audiobook, and Gay is our narrator. Her performance is solid, the words are really the star, not her intonation or expressiveness. I would not, however, recommend this as an audiobook. I found her stories and reflections to be so personal and traumatic that I wanted to turn her off. I wanted to turn away and disconnect, and with Gay’s own voice there recounting the pain it is impossible to get a break. The book might be more manageable, as a reader you have control over the pace and can take time to digest some of the more intense moments of the book.
This is a a great memoir. It deals with violence done to a body and could have some trigger warnings in that respect. If you like an honest and raw memoir, this is your book. It is not an enjoyable read so much as an important and moving one. There is so much pain and suffering, but also much empowerment and honesty.
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