#HUNGER ROXANE GAY 400 X 150 PIXELS FULL#
I’m entirely too full of stories about emaciated women in hospitals and specific details about how sick someone was. I hunger for stories about weight gain and overeating and trauma. That’s one of the reasons why Gay’s book is so important. Being thin will, supposedly, make us wholly happy.
We are told that we cannot be happy until we are thin - no matter how successful we are - and that by being thin, we are instantly happy, despite what else is going on in our lives. That we need to discipline them with rules. She also argues that women, especially, are raised and conditioned to think that our bodies are a problem that need to be solved, something we need to lessen. She has shame about her body and has realized she no longer needs to be fat ( fat is a descriptor, not a bad word) in order to feel safe, but pulling back is harder than she expected. It’s not easy to live in a larger body, especially in a world with thin privilege. However, she struggled with her body’s size. Despite her parents’ attempts to try to help her lose weight, Gay purposely gained it all back. She ate and became bigger in order to feel safer. Hunger screams to the universe of our own prejudices and shares a unique story that will make you sad, and will make you angry in all the ways that matter.Gay, a black woman, was gang-raped at the age of 12 and spent many of her years eating and eating in hopes of becoming larger and less conventionally attractive. If you are already a fan of Roxane Gay’s writing or enjoy powerfully moving memoirs, I cannot recommend this enough and please don’t let my own experience dissuade you. It’s so important to have books like Hunger out there in the universe to perpetuate change. It’s so easy to get sucked into our own lives that we forget how easy we have things, in regards to so many details – gender, race, class, religion, weight. All in all, it’s a very powerful memoir that reminded me to acknowledge my privileged. She is vulnerable and open regarding the way she is treated and the challenges she has to overcome in order to experience the fullness of life so many of us take for granted. She discusses the events that adjusted that relationship. Roxane talks about her relationship with her body. The only thing that kept me from DNF-ing this was the hope that the next essay would rope me in. And that should be okay, right? But when it’s a well-loved book, and it’s about so potent and important a topic, and when it’s a memoir, it’s difficult to say I didn’t enjoy it. There’s lots of things are right about the book. Her writing style is fine and the points she makes are incredibly important. She tells the same stories in different settings.Īgain, there’s nothing wrong with this. This is bound to happen in a 300 page book that talks about only one topic. Her writing style includes a lot of repetition. Roxane Gay tells her stories in such a way that unapologetically calls out the types of things that cause shame to people like herself (which is good) and describes the ways her body makes her feel like she’s trapped in a cage. And not in that “this makes me uncomfortable, so I dislike it” way. You’re not supposed to love this book, but you are supposed to respect and support it. The stories Roxane Gay shares are intense and difficult to read. In fact, it’s a very raw, honest memoir about a topic that is so deeply personal.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with Hunger. I feel like rubbish when I don’t enjoy a book that everyone else loves.
#HUNGER ROXANE GAY 400 X 150 PIXELS 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.
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. 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. Genres: Biography, Feminism, Memoir, Non-Fiction Published by HarperCollins on June 13, 2017 Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay