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Shelf Awareness 2017 Best Books of the Year, Nonfiction It’s a book I can’t forget.Hardcover edition Publisher HarperCollins Imprint Harper ISBN 9780062362599 Awards and Honors Booklist Top 10 Diverse Nonfiction 2018ALA 2018 Notable Book Lists, NonfictionĢ017 National Book Critics Circle Finalist, Autobiography It is raw and powerful, and essential reading for everyone. It’s a book I won’t forget. It’s about being the daughter of middle-class Haitian immigrants and not fitting into the narrative of blackness, and it’s about being a feminist. Hunger is about the consequences of being gang-raped when Gay was 12. I run, just about every day, to chase away the memory of my past self. My weight still fluctuates, and if I’m totally honest, my experiences as a fat kid continue to influence - more like haunt - my life today. But how I was then, and what I am now - at my worst I was 120kgs, and my lightest I was 65kgs - has stayed with me. At least for a time, until one day something snapped, and I made a decision to do something about my weight, before the situation was taken out of my hands.
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I endured the cruel taunts from those around me, but the most savage always came from my own mind: so many days and nights spent lamenting my body, knowing its condition was my own fault, but unable - well, in my case, unwilling - to do anything about it. But I am cognisant of the horridness of an existence in a body society frowns upon. So I can’t pretend my experience was anything like Gay’s, not really especially in a society where it’s more acceptable for a man to be overweight than a woman.
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I should make it clear: my body was of my own making: not the consequence of a terrible experience, just human weakness, and the continual submission to my personal deficiencies. Gay’s account of life in a “fat body” struck a chord for me, reminding me of my adolescence as a fat teenager. Moments of lightness - a self-deprecatory humour - punctuate Hunger genuinely hilarious laugh-out-loud moments, such as when Gay describes her perspective on the “exceedingly thin people at the gym” with their “placid facial expressions” and their outfits which constitute “shorts so short that the material is more a suggestion than an actual item of clothing” her relationship with her personal trainer or how when she played soccer as a child, she’d be more focused on the grass than the game going on around her. That it’s endemic in our society is shameful. It is harrowing, and so Goddamn fucking awful, that a young woman’s innocence and youth could be stolen in such a way. The personal demons that haunt Gay stem from a devastating gang rape at the age of 12, which is rendered so starkly here, so incredibly powerfully, it is something I will never forget. Right at the start, she declares that her story is devoid of “any powerful insight into what it takes to overcome an unruly body and unruly appetites.” This isn’t a story about success, but about the eternal struggle she has faced, and continues to face, coping with the fallout of a terrible violation in her youth. Readers would not expect Gay to pull any punches in the telling of her own story, and she certainly doesn’t. Hunger is a gut-wrenching, heart-rending, personal discourse on the brutality of life in a fat body - a queer, Haitian-American fat woman’s body, if you want to be specific - in a world that shames and forgets such people. Already a woman I greatly admire for her writing - particularly for the incredible An Untamed State,which is the one constant on my ever-changing list of favourite books - and her unflinching honesty, and take-no-bullshit attitude, I’ve been looking forward to Hunger since its announcement a while back.Īnd of course it doesn’t disappoint. Roxane Gay’s memoir of body image and sexual trauma is unsparingly honest and confronting.