Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

Book, 2017

Premise - Roxane Gay's personal memoir on finding a relationship with her so-called "unruly" body. Her struggles with obesity and sexual trauma made her feel as though she never had true control over her body. But of course, one and one's body are one and the same.


Review - Another "Our Shared Shelf" pick! I'm going through these fast! I chose this one next so I could check off my "Read a book about food" category at my local library, but though this is a book about hunger, food only plays a small part in it. What else do we hunger for? To be loved? To be worthy? I also wanted to read this for the simple reason that I love Roxane Gay, and would love to take the time to read all of her works. So far, only this and Bad Feminist have been checked off my list but I was thoroughly impressed by both. In all honesty, I liked Bad Feminist more. However, it is unfair to make a comparison between Bad Feminist and Hunger because they are so fundamentally different in format and purpose. Bad Feminist was more entertaining due to the high level of variety, but that is mostly due to the fact that it is a series of essays. Hunger, on the other hand, has one cohesive story and theme. Nonetheless, it did feel unexcusably repetitive at times, especially given the fact that it is already such a short work. Bad Feminist was also less personal, and more lighthearted, but Hunger is a memoir, and a dark, honest one, so that's to be expected.

Now that I've gotten the nitpicky comparisons out of the way, I can go ahead and say that my overall impression of this memoir was highly favorable. There's something about the style of Gay's writing that is just so... good. The flow of her words, the words she chooses, her sentence lengths... all good. Feels dumb to say, but it's true, and not automatically true of every writer.

As far as content, I found it incredibly moving and thought-provoking. I saw on Wikipedia one negative review that accuses the memoir of solipsism, but my immediate thought was... isn't that the purpose of a memoir? To take the time to focus only on the self and how one perceives their own experiences? The memoir is about no one but Gay herself, but I think she had every right to share her story. And I do think, as a natural consequence of her experiences, she had a lot of things to say about how society as a whole treats women, obesity, and specifically obese women.

I'm fascinated that I find myself so invested in Gay. As I said with Bad Feminist, we have so little in common. Her memoir gave a tidal wave of evidence to that. Only a tiny, TINY fraction of what was said was personally relatable to my life. I know what it's like to not feel as though you have control over your body, or feel like there's a disconnect between mind and body, which is frustrating when you remember that mind and body are the same. We are our bodies, and that can be tough to reconcile. I relate to being a woman, and being attracted to men, but also being scared of the hurt they can inflict on women (on a much, MUCH smaller and more innocent scale than Gay). Most of all, I relate to her love of literature. She's a writer, a reader - a dreamer. She understands more than anyone how deep one's relationship can be with fiction.

Those small moments of relatability help keep me passionate about Gay's writing. But they are not enough to sustain my attention. I don't read Gay because she's relatable to me, I read Gay because she's a great writer with a fascinating life. She had profound insight into her own life and behavioral patterns, and nothing gives me more pleasure than character analyses.

It's not the most pleasurable read. It's uncomfortable, frightening, and at times repulsive, considering these are all real life horrors that happened to a real-life person. Her weight alone is far less disturbing to me than all of the things that happened to cause her weight gain, and all of the judgment she received as a result. As many condescending individuals thought in her book, I too focused on what health problems I feared she would suffer as a result of her weight. But in truth, no one is more familiar with the health consequences than Roxane herself. She's the one that is out of breath after climbing the stairs. She's the one who can't fit into ordinary chairs. As she said herself, overweight people aren't stupid. They know of all the ways their body oppresses them better than any doctor could tell them. Her honesty about the subject will hopefully encourage her readers to be equally as honest, so that we can better remember to treat each other with dignity and respect. (83/100)

Quote - “Because I read so much, I was a romantic in my heart of hearts, but my desire to be part of a romantic story was a very intellectual, detached one. I liked the idea of a boy asking me out, taking me on a date, kissing me, but I did not want to actually be alone with a boy, because a boy could hurt me.” - DAMN STRAIGHT

“I often tell my students that fiction is about desire in one way or another. The older I get, the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires. We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.”

If you liked this book, I recommend Bad Feminist!

Written by Roxane Gay
Published by Harper Collins