Still, and more importantly, the language is also full of compassion, for herself, and for the girl and the teen that gained the weight and the woman who today wants to lose that weight.
This is not an easy conversation to have: there is so much shame, and loaded language, and prejudices.īut Gay is a superb writer, and she achieves this conversation with great clarity as well as devastating precision. Her language is careful and restraint as she explores, one by one, the fears and the traumas of her past and present, and of carrying around the weight, both physical and psychological as a fat person in North America in the 21st century. If the tone of her writing has always seemed to me to be razor sharp and unapologetic, in Hunger I felt a new vulnerability that is humbling, and one that made me extremely thankful to be a reader – thankful to have this book give voice, and provide a language, to the conversation about fat bodies and their struggles for respect and acceptance. I loved it on her collection of essays Bad Feminist and in Difficult Women, her collection of short stories. In her latest book Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxane Gay writes the story of her body, confronting her past and present and all the events that led her to become a heavily overweight person for most of her adult life.
The story of a body is the story of a life lived, the physical manifestation of the sum of our experiences, the sun we have enjoyed, the cold our hands have endured, the food we have eaten, but also, the traumas we have suffered. This hate is not innate rather, it has been ingrained in us from an early age through a culture that measures the values of girls and women through their bodies, each pound gained, and year aged, lowering that value. In an unending cycle, we hate, try to lose the weight, become overwhelmed by the difficulty, give up and then start all over again. As women, our criticism of our bodies is often ruthless our rolls, dimples, stretch marks, and cellulite a reflection of our laziness, carelessness, our excesses. Everyday, women of all ages around the world look in the mirror and hate what they see.