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I start to feel full but I ignore that fullness and then that sense of fullness goes away and all I feel is sick, but still, I eat. All I care about are the flavors in my mouth, the extraordinary pleasure of the act of eating. At first, it feels good, savoring each bite, the world falling away. If there is food left on the stove, I must finish it. If the food is on my plate, I must finish it. When I am eating a meal, I have no sense of portion control. Take this remarkable, propulsive sequence: But Hunger unearthed something even deeper in me. There was constant shame then, but I look back, as Gay does in a moving sequence with childhood photos, and see a perfectly fine-looking teenager. These resonances aren’t just because I was bullied in high school for my weight, though I was badly bullied (to be hit and choked while one is called fat paradoxically really makes one want a Skor bar).
I told her, ‘people like me don’t get to eat food like that in public,’ and it was one of the truest things I’ve ever said.” – I rarely eat carbohydrates in public. “Before I got on the plane, my best friend offered me a bag of potato chips to eat, but I denied myself that. I try to pick times when there won’t be many people around, partly to protect myself, partly out of self -loathing.” – I once quit a gym when a well-intentioned man critiqued my squats. “When I go to the gym on my own, I always feel like all eyes are on me. “I go to the doctor as rarely as possible because when I go, whether for an ingrown toenail or a cold, doctors can only see and diagnose my body.” – I haven’t been to a doctor in ten years.
Vade mecum.”Įxcellent Latin usage, and a great review, but I identified strongly with Hunger. For men who read the book, it will be more of a travelogue. I didn’t want to fall into the trap of using Gay’s book to write about myself, but was struck by a line in The New York Review of Books: “…I suspect that every woman who reads Hunger will recognize herself in it. The book is also frequently very funny: “Oftentimes the people who I make uncomfortable by admitting that I don’t love being fat are what I call Lane Bryant fat.” But many of the anecdotes interested me on a deeper level.
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Part of Hunger’s intrigue is in the frustrating ramifications of this transformation: small movie theater seats, or needing help getting onto a high stage during an event, or strangers taking items out of Gay’s shopping cart (!). “I don’t know how I let things get so out of control, but I do.” She eventually weighs 577 pounds. It spreads through the body like an infection.” One beautifully depicted consequence of this infection: Gay eats, hoping to disguise her body, disappear into armor. We swallow it, and more often than not, that truth turns rancid. “All too often, what ‘he said’ matters more, so we just swallow the truth. The boy brings her to a cabin where his friends are waiting, and a horrible sexual assault takes place. Hunger reaches this most difficult part of its narrative early, after a sequence of short introductory chapters: Twelve-year-old Gay falls in love with a boy. We are pulled in by the repetition, as we are by Gay’s hesitance. I wish I could leave it at that, but this is a memoir of my body so I need to tell you what happened to my body. It is easier to say, “something terrible happened.”
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I don’t know how to talk about rape and sexual violence when it comes to my own story. She writes early in Hunger that her “life is split in two, cleaved not so neatly. That Gay has reached so many is testament to her skill with empathetic connection. I’m writing this on a flight (Gay’s passages on airplane issues are some of her best: the seatbelt extenders, having to buy two tickets) and the woman across the aisle is reading Bad Feminist. Roxane Gay’s Hunger is very, very good-the rare memoir that doubles as page-turner.