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This repetition also gives readers a bit of insight into her writing process: She has to keep forcing herself to dig deeper-she pushes herself to write her truth and doesn’t settle for anything less. “I don’t know how I let things got so out of control, but I do.” (6) “I don’t know how things got so out of control, or I do.” (13) “I do not know why I turned to food. This repeated phrase reminded me that it is not always so easy to point to cause and effect, to draw a line of causation from one thing to another. I read this phrase as communicating a paradox: Gay both does and does not understand why things happened, why she reacted a certain way, why her defense mechanism was to eat and eat and eat. She returns to the phrase, “or I do” throughout the first section before (and after) she tells readers the details of her rape. “I found ways to hide in plain sight, to keep feeding a hunger that could never be satisfied-the hunger to stop hurting.” Few chapters do not come back to this main idea of hunger. Nearly every chapter ties into her “thesis” of hunger, whether she’s talking about gaining weight, eating, wanting more from relationships, wanting to heal, or trying to live life in her body. Gay uses repetition poetically, and she spins a linguistic shorthand throughout the memoir. Beyond the sentence level, Hunger’s chapters are short-often a few pages-and tightly focused on one idea. Gay doesn’t dance around the point she tells readers clearly what she wants us to know (or what she doesn’t want us to know). She often uses short, simple sentences to tell her story and draw readers into her thinking and feeling-for example, the quote a few paragraphs above makes use of concise sentences. Simplicity and repetition mark Gay’s prose this makes the book easy to read and acts as a counterbalance to the heavy topics of rape and abuse. It’s hard to read about the terrible thing that was done to her and how she’s still healing from it, but it’s important to read in order to understand Gay’s narrative throughout her memoir and the effect that these things have on women on a societal level. She lays it bare without giving gratuitous details-she says it’s still hard to talk about. As a reader, I was initially uncomfortable being drawn into such a personal story, but Gay handles this intimacy well. That is not easy.” She isn’t hyperbolizing here-this memoir digs deep into her self and her body. As she says: “I’ve been forced to look at my guiltiest secrets. This is a book about learning, however slowly, to allow myself to be seen and understood.” Gay writes: “This is a book about my body, about my hunger, and ultimately, this is a book about disappearing and being lost and wanting so very much, wanting to be seen and understood.
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: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxane Gay explores the interconnectedness between her rape, trying to feel safe in her own body, and gaining weight. 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.