It's a deeply moving, somewhat experimental, gorgeously written and brilliantly thought-out memoir. After being gang-raped at the age of twelve, she felt.
Hunger chronicles her complex relationship with her body. At her heaviest, Gay tells us early in the book, she weighed 577 lbs as a twenty-something. I also love that it is a story about sexual assault and the ways in which that can change your life. Roxane Gays relationship with her body and identity has been fraught with conflict for most of her life. Underestimating the love of her Catholic family, she told no one about her rape but instead turned to food for comfort, and over time, her body became both a fortress and a cage for her. I love that it takes an unconventional road to storytelling and that the structure often spirals within itself in interesting ways. I'm very thankful for Roxane Gay's Hunger, which should be and should have been on every award list if people were really reading. Her survivor's story is both understated and inspiring. I have reviewed many interesting books for the TLS this year, but the most moving is Roxane Gay's Hunger. Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group ISBN: 9781472153791 Number of pages: 288 Weight: 226 g Dimensions: 131 x 199 x 18 mm MEDIA REVIEWS
Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and tells a story that hasn't yet been told but needs to be.
With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. From the New York Times best-selling author of Bad Feminist, a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger. Roxane Gay is the author of the essay collection Bad Feminist, which was a New York Times bestseller the novel An Untamed State, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize the memoir Hunger, which was a New York Times bestseller and received a National Book Critics Circle citation and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. In Hunger, she casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties-including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life-and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life. 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. New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.' 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.