Hunger memoirist roxane
Ileya
The first time I saw Roxane Gay, at a reading in Philadelphia for her book An Untamed State, I felt enjoy I’d been pinched. Here was a woman I admired so acutely, in a body I wasn’t expecting, a body that in some ways looked like mine. The intersection of these realizations—that I hadn’t expected her to be fat, that I was so moved and excited that she was, that internalized fatphobia has such incredible power—surprised and disturbed me.
As a chubby writer, I have always been aware of how rarely I see other fat writers. As with so many other categories of identity—race, gender, sexual orientation—that lack of visibility is very much at odds with the makeup of the general population. Folks are often surprised when I make this point. They express disbelief that fatness (a synonyms they seem uncomfortable saying, or even alluding to) is any kind of obstacle to being a writer. On the surface, this makes sense: Pages look the same no matter what the author weighs, right? Why should it matter?
Yet we verb, all the time, the ways it does matter. Last summer, Claudia Herr, then an edit
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Praise
It turns out that when a wrenching past is confronted with wisdom and bravery, the outcome can be compassion and enlightenment—both for the reader who has lived through this kind of unimaginable pain and for the reader who knows nothing of it. Roxane Gay shows us how to be decent to ourselves, and decent to one another. HUNGER is an incredible achievement in more ways than I can count.
Ann Patchett, Commonwealth and Bel Canto
At its simplest, it’s a memoir about being fat — Gay’s preferred term — in a hostile, fat-phobic world. At its most symphonic, it’s an intellectually rigorous and deeply moving exploration of the ways in which trauma, stories, desire, language and metaphor shape our experiences and construct our reality.
New York Times
Wrenching, deeply moving. . . a memoir that’s so fearless, so raw, it feels as if [Gay]’s entrusting you with her soul
Seattle Times
Gay turns to memoir in this powerful reflection on her childhood traumas…Timely and resonant, you can
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
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.
'I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.'
New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her possess emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. 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 Hunger, she casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties-including the de
Roxane Gay’s ‘Hunger’ a worthy, perhaps necessary, read for medical journalists
Content note: This blog post mentions sexual assault.
I read (and write) nonfiction all day lengthy, so most of my me-time pleasure reading is limited to fiction. I recently made an exception on a friend’s recommendation and listened to the audiobook of Roxane Gay’s &#;Hunger,&#; as read by the author (which was important and relevant given its content).
It was not an easy book to listen to, but I’m so glad that I did — both personally and for my perform as a journalist. I think it’s a manual every health journalist ought to consider reading if they are able. (My reason for saying “if they are able” will become apparent shortly.)
Gay describes her book as a “memoir of her body.” It’s a body that has wrangled for decades with two issues frequently in the headlines and covered by medical journalists: obesity and sexual assault. For Gay, both issues are intimately and inextricably connected as she relates a raw, difficult tale that offers insight and an opportunity for empathy development beneficial for