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Reading the book is to witness the gap between the conscious mind and the unconscious body – in combat for years. Writing can be escapist and can be an opiate (it has been both for Gay, although neither here). But most important, in the context of this book, writing is weightlessness. There is a tension between her low self-esteem and the self-worth needed to write this courageous, honest book.Ī New York Times and Guardian US columnist, her punchy authority is in contrast to what she describes. Her mutinous body is the continuing subtext – going its own way, persisting in its compulsions, fleshing out the story. Those boys treated me like nothing so I became nothing.” “Hating myself became as natural as breathing. Gay did not tell her parents what had happened until she had grown up. Raised as a Catholic, the daughter of Haitian immigrant parents – her father a civil engineer – she feared their reaction. She felt guilty for once fancying the boy who raped her. Terrible to think of a 12-year-old child willing herself to go on as though nothing had happened. One longs to be able to go back in time, to intervene, to find help for her. #HUNGER BY ROXANE GAY MALAPROPS HOW TO#.F at is more than a feminist issue – as this extraordinary memoir by novelist and essayist Roxane Gay reveals.
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Gay’s last book, Bad Feminist, became a New York Times bestseller and revealed her to be a writer unfazed by inconvenient truths and a champion of women – especially gay and black women. Hunger tells a story that must have been as hard to write as it is disturbing to read. She does not duck from telling us, early on, that at 6ft 3in tall, she weighed, at her heaviest, 577 pounds: “That is a staggering number, one I hardly believe, but at one point, that was the truth of my body.” She does – and does not – know, she says, how things got so out of hand. To some extent, she is on the side of Susie Orbach. She remarks with devastating simplicity: “This is what most girls are taught – that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space.” But her book is a bid to take up space in another sense, to tell a story that wants to shrink into invisibility yet needs to be told. Terrible to think of a 12-year-old child willing herself to go on as though nothing had happened A personal story, with implications for us all. “Something terrible happened,” she writes. “That something terrible broke me.” Aged 12, she was gang-raped by “a boy I thought I loved, and a group of his friends”. They were in an abandoned hunting cabin in the woods in Omaha, Nebraska, where no one but the boys could hear her screams. She drags her account on to the page – faltering, incomplete, unsensational.
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“They were boys who were not yet men but knew, already, how to do the damage of men.” One reads about the unthinkable abuse she suffered – the boy holding her wrists and spitting in her face after raping her is a particularly upsetting detail – and feels as shaken as if one were directly witnessing what she describes. Yet this is no attention-seeking misery memoir. The book is an attempt to see fat in its complexity, its contrariness – as potentially more than a physical problem to be overcome. And although Gay regrets she is unable to go as far as the campaigners who rejoice in their size, she does want us to rethink what fatness can mean.įor Gay, overeating was, for a while, her solution. She makes it persuasively plain that fatness began as a response to rape. The fatter her body became, the safer she felt. Fatness was home in a game of chase: “a place where no one can get you”.