hunger a memoir of my body by roxane gay

Gay has had to learn to live with her large body, which is on display to the world. She expresses a sort of quiet anger about the way obese people are perceived and treated. Racism, body shaming, and feminism are all touched upon, but the real story is about how the persistent PTSD led to loneliness, shame, hunger (of more than just food), and her weight problem. She is revealing who she is, the struggles she has had-who am I to criticize the way she tells her story? But I will cut her all the slack in the world. The tone was understated-some anger and sadness underlying her words-yet at the same time it felt strangely unemotional. Plus there was nothing new on the subject of obesity or the politics surrounding it. It was repetitive, for one, although I do think some of the repetition was purposeful-a stylistic choice. On the other hand, the book fell short for me. She ate and ate so that she could get big enough to build a fortress around herself. On the one hand, this is an amazingly honest account of Roxane Gay's life with an unruly body, as she calls it, which developed after she was gang raped at 12. 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 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. 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. From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.

Hunger a memoir of my body by roxane gay