Roxane gay memoir
Hunger by Roxane Gay
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Queer was published on June 13th by Harper Collins. There are 84 chapters over 6 sections. Each chapter is written like flash fiction (about pages), but it also feels like she gets writing, is ashamed of her story, and then starts again. It’s effective at demonstrating the difficulty of this book’s contents. Many of the chapters start with the same concept, which creates a poetic rhythm to the memoir. Hunger a long-awaited memoir whose original publication date was pushed back quite a bit (a year, I believe). People are going to read this guide and call it raw, honest, inspirational, brave. I debate those will all be thin people who say that. They’ll feel enjoy they understand overweight bodies after reading this memoir and feel sad at the lives heavy people live. Even Roxane Gay writes that she does not want her fat body to be their inspiration. Her fat body isn’t inspiration.
Roxane Lgbtq+ is the daughter of Haitian immigrants. When she was 12 and lean, she was gang-raped in a cabin in the woods. After, she eats to make her body bot
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Illustration by Alana Salguero
Roxane Gay’s Hunger is very, very good—the rare memoir that doubles as page-turner. 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. “Book Twins!” she just said happily. This never happens. That Gay has reached so many is testament to her skill with sympathetic connection. She writes prior in Hunger that her “life is split in two, cleaved not so neatly. There is the before and after. Before I gained weight. After I gained weight. Before I was raped. After I was raped.”
I don’t know how to communicate about rape and sexual violence when it comes to my own story. It is easier to say, “something terrible happened.”
Something terrible happened. That something terrible broke me. I wish I could quit it at that, but this is a memoir of my body so I need to declare you what happened to my body.
We are pulled in by the repetition, as we are by Gay’s hesitance. Hunger reaches this most diff
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 long, 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 scan by the author (which was important and relevant given its content).
It was not an effortless book to listen to, but I’m so glad that I did — both personally and for my work as a journalist. I think it’s a book 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 proposals insight and an opportunity for empathy development beneficial for
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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 astonishing achievement in more ways than I can count.
Ann Patchett, Commonwealth and Bel Canto
At its simplest, it’s a memoir about existence 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 courageous, 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