At age 12, she was gang-raped in the woods by a boy she liked, who had brought along a posse of friends to hold her down and take turns with her. Her weight is the sum of her traumatic past. It’s simply “the story of my body…not a story of triumph.” She says this in the stripped-down prose that conveys the excruciating difficulty required to extract and display the truths that reside in that body. She puts a number to it: In her late 20s, at 6 feet 3 inches tall, she was 577 pounds, though now she is a few hundred pounds less.Īs she warns us early in the book, this is not a success story, nor the text equivalent of those grainy before and after photos where a skinny person poses in one leg of their former fat pants. That’s because there’s an urgency to Hunger just as there is to hunger: Gay is compelled to help readers understand and feel what it’s like to be “caged” (her word) in a body that’s “super morbidly obese” (her doctor’s words). That same night, I gave the book to someone who needed it-they didn’t know they needed it, not yet-and bought a second copy. Have you ever thought about your weight? Have you ever thought about someone else’s weight? Are you a human being who comes into contact with other human beings? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should read this book.
When I turned the last page of Roxane Gay’s new memoir, Hunger, I took a picture of the cover and posted this to Facebook: By Alison Buckholtz (author, Navy spouse)