Hailey told me about Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body the day after it released. She dragged Ashley and me to the closest Barnes and Noble so she could pick up her copy. I picked up books I still haven’t read, and Ash picked up a copy of a book I pretended I had read.
A few weeks later, Hailey begged me to read Hunger. I didn’t want to. “She’s so honest about her trauma,” Hailey told me. “It’s such a hard read but so worth it.” I put off reading it for over a year—perhaps because I knew it would be so difficult to read. There’s something special to be said about people who share such intimate things about themselves; maybe that they share too much. Or maybe it’s that their stories are important and deserve to be said, screamed and shouted from rooftops, so people listen.
Roxane Gay is no stranger to sharing stories about her life, her assault, and her trauma. Her book is brutally honest about her body and the many ways it has been “broken”—her gang rape as a 12-year-old, her quest to gain as much weight as possible, and living in a world where that weight is not acceptable. Of her rape, Gay says it is easier to say, “something terrible happened,” but this negates the full truth, and this book provided her the means to “voice what I could not say out loud. I had lost my voice but I had words.”
Something terrible did happen, Gay is a victim of sexual violence—though she says she is not brave, heroic, or strong, or special. She is only “one woman who has experienced something countless women have experienced. I am a victim who survived.” Gay highlights that having a history of sexual violence is common, and she only shares her story so that those who read it can be “appropriately horrified” by how sexual violence can tear a person apart. Despite the sexual violence she endured, she is “stronger than [she] is broken.” Gay also describes what it means to say no and not be heard. As stories of sexual violence are shared more openly, the truth that sometimes “no” does not matter becomes increasingly apparent. Gay realized this when she registered how often “he said” matters more than “she said.” She became fully aware of this sad truth when she “finally did say no. And it did not matter.”
Struggles with weight and her history with sexual violence aside, Gay makes one thing clear: she has a deep love for her family. Despite the terrible, hideous things that happened to Gay, her family kept her grounded and fought for her—even when she failed to recognize it. Gay believes “everything good and strong about me starts with my parents, absolutely everything.” After enduring such trauma as a 12-year-old she could no longer hide and pretend to be the “good Catholic daughter” her parents had raised. She ran away from her family halfway through her undergraduate degree to live in Arizona with a man she met online, for what she calls her “lost” year. When she reunited with her family she was able to take in the “breathtaking spectacle of this family, the beautiful beast we become when we are together.” Still, Gay felt she could not be completely honest with them. The lack of honesty became distance between Gay and her parents, and this distance was a “haunting, lonely feeling, thinking you don’t belong with the very people who know you in the truest, deepest ways.”
Gay’s words challenged me. For 141 pages I told myself I would not insert myself into this review. That I would remove myself from the narrative, to ensure it was Gays’ voice I was hearing, not my own. I tried not to see myself in Gay. I did. I resonate with her unhappiness with her body. I understand Gay and her hunger. Gay believes she gained weight so her body would become “a safe harbor rather than a small, weak vessel that betrayed me.” Her weight gain was for safety—so she would become repulsive to men and therefore, be safe from the damage they threaten. Gay also uses her memoir to criticize the American culture that shames and causes women to believe the “desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood.” In this culture, she contends, her existence is reduced to mere statistics, where no matter how successful she or other fat women may become, they should not be satisfied unless they are also thin.
Gay’s simple sentences, like “It is not my job to please them with my body,” and “Taking up too much space and still finding nowhere to fit,” speak volumes. She does not clutter her writing with eloquent, sophisticated language—she is straightforward and unambiguous. Her book is about more than sexual violence and the journey that came after. As the title suggests, it is about what it means to be hungry, in every sense. She was hungry for help, even when that help came from shows like The Biggest Loser, Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss and Revenge Body. She watched these shows “because even though [she knew] how damaging and unrealistic they are, some part of [her] still yearns for the salvation they promise.” She was hungry to discipline her body. Even though she believes it is “wildly undisciplined,” she still chooses to “deny [herself] nearly everything [she] desires.” She was hungry to show the world just how capable her body is: “This body is resilient. It can endure all kinds of things. My body offers me the power of presence. My body is powerful.” In Gay’s words, “Women continue to hunger. And so do I.”
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