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“When I was twelve years old I was raped and then I ate and ate and ate to build my body into a fortress,” writes Roxane Gay in her 2017 bestseller, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. From the very first pages, it is clear that Hunger is an incredibly intimate memoir, one that required a great deal of emotional introspection from its author. Gay makes it clear that her memoir will not be an inspirational weight-loss story, a victorious tale of how she overcame her struggles with obesity—but rather a reflection on her ongoing struggle to feel at home in a body that is “unruly”.
Gay writes of her childhood, growing up in an upper-middle class family with stable and loving parents, before her innocence was robbed by a boy whom she thought she loved. One who took advantage of her body repeatedly before leading her to a shed in the woods and encouraging a group of friends to brutally gang rape her when she was only twelve. She writes of her life in two parts, before and after the assault, before and after the shame and guilt that forced Gay to draw into herself, to protect herself from further attack. She began reading and writing as a form of escape, a way to control her narrative and imagine a life separate from the trauma that followed her everywhere in the real world. Gay is prevented by shame from reporting her rape to law enforcement or her loved ones, and thus a vicious cycle of misunderstanding begins, where her family becomes concerned with her weight gain and lacks the information necessary to understand the source of her pain.
Gay deals largely in paradoxes, discussing how her weight gain was both a loss of control and a means of gaining control. While Gay lost control of her appetite, she gained control of the way she presented herself in the world, gained the ability to make herself invisible to those who could harm her. She acknowledges the complicated duality of accepting her body as it is but also desiring to change it. She rails against acquaintances who act like calling oneself fat is an insult, like being fat and beautiful/kind/intelligent is somehow a balance that cannot exist. Gay describes how it feels to live in a body that is an everyday reminder of her rape, but also celebrate the ways that she has grown and thrived in her body that are separate from her victimhood.
Gay writes of the years following her brutal assault, “I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe.” What she is describing here is not an uncommon response to trauma. A 2013 analysis with 57,000 participants concluded that women who experienced physical and/or sexual abuse during their childhood were twice as likely to have food addictions than those who did not report and childhood abuse. The Centers for Disease Control and Protection’s ongoing ACE Study suggests that over six million obese adults in America suffered from some form of abuse in their childhood, whether it be physical, sexual, verbal, or emotional. A Swedish meta-analysis of studies with 112,000 participants concluded that “being subjected to abuse during childhood entails a markedly increased risk of developing obesity as an adult.”
One of the ways that Gay understands her body is as a response to those who violated it. Like many others who experience severe trauma in their youth, she gained weight in order to become invisible, to turn attention away from her vulnerable body. Despite the clear psychological factors contributing to her obesity, Gay describes fatphobic medical professionals who prescribed diets or weight loss surgeries without confronting the source of the problem. Reading Hunger, I was reminded of Samantha Irby writing about doctors openly expressing disdain for her body, shaming her for her weight and refusing to believe her when she expressed concerns about her health, in her essay collection, Sorry, No Thank You. Gay writes, “People are quick to offer statistics and information about the dangers of obesity, as if you are not only fat but incredibly stupid, unaware, and delusional about your body and a world that is vigorously inhospitable to that body.”
Hunger is a deeply personal reflection on what happens in a healthcare system that doesn’t acknowledge the humanity of bodies that don’t fit inside its restrictive standards. Gay writes profoundly about her traumas, ranging from the the rape to the everyday traumas of being a fat person in the world. She writes about Googling restaurants ahead of time to make sure she can sit comfortably in them, the struggle of travel on airplanes with judgmental passengers/staff, the bruises that mark her body from chairs with armrests—all parts of the day-to-day reality of a person for whom public spaces are not built to accommodate. Hunger is so moving because Gay forces herself to be extremely candid, to create space for herself and the many others who feel her pain. In Hunger, Gay does not shy away from the real grunt work of healing, and readers will revel in her efforts.