Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay is a story of identity, desire, and resilience. In honest and unadorned prose, Gay tells us about a defining moment in her early teens that shaped the rest of her life. She was raped by a group of boys, betrayed by one she considered a friend. In an attempt to manage the shame and trauma of the rape, over the course of the next 20 years she got involved in more abusive relationships and became morbidly obese, eating to create a protective fortress of invisibility with her body, finding herself managing not only her own poor self-esteem, but also the negative opinions and physical obstacles of our fat-phobic culture. Confounding our genre expectations, she tells us upfront,
The story of my body is not a story of triumph. This is not a weight-loss memoir. There will be no picture of a thin version of me, my slender body emblazoned across this book's cover, with me standing in one leg of my former, fatter self's jeans. This is not a book that will offer motivation. I don't have any powerful insight into what it takes to overcome an unruly body and unruly appetites.
This is not an easy book to read. Gay understands this:
Writing this book is the most difficult thing I've ever done. To lay myself so vulnerable has not been an easy thing. To face myself and what living in my body has been like has not been an easy thing, but I wrote this book because it felt necessary. In writing this memoir of my body, in telling you these truths about my body, I am sharing my truth and mine alone. I understand if that truth is not something you want to hear. The truth makes me uncomfortable too.
It feels like a necessary book, not just for Gay, but for her readers. Through reading Gay's story, we can understand the world from a point of view, from a very real and lived--and uncomfortable--perspective, in a way we might not otherwise have done.
What do you think? Did reading
Hunger make you uncomfortable? Why? Think back to your childhood and young adulthood: What experiences helped to create the person you are today? Were they all necessarily positive? How would you describe your own body image? What messages do you feel that you receive from our culture about the body you inhabit? Discuss the role that Gay's family, teachers, friends, lovers, doctors, colleagues, and others played in her self-image. Gay writes, "People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. They think they know the why of my body. They do not." What are our culture's ideals and beliefs about the body? What assumptions have you made about overweight people in the past? Has reading
Hunger changed your view and assumptions in any way? Are you familiar with recent scientific research that indicates that our food preferences, appetite, and size are largely genetic? At the heart of Gay's writing in
Hunger is a conflict, expressed rhetorically by statements such as, "I feel a certain way. Or I don't." The title also includes an ambivalent set of parentheses around the word "my." What do you think she is trying to express? How would you describe Gay's writing style and tone? Do you find it effective? What about genre: If it is not a weight-loss memoir or a self-help manual, what is it?
We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, July 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, July 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.
