For the uninitiated, she’s a black American of Haitian descent, Scrabble nerd, fiction-writer, feminist, survivor, and opinion-writer for websites like Salon and The Rumpus, who with Bad Feminist seems to have reached a. I know that hunger is in the mind and the body and the heart and the soul.” Gay writes from all these parts of herself in “Hunger,” from the places that ache and seethe and yearn as well as the places that make meaning, and this alters her use of language, pares it down to a breathtaking simplicity. She brings humanity and dignity to every topic she touches, from sexual abuse to Real Housewives. “My father believes hunger is in the mind,” she writes.
In this unforgettable memoir, Gay invites us inside the walls she has erected, shares the chasm of vulnerability beneath her fierce intellect, gives us direct access to the pain she faces daily in a world hostile to “unruly” obese bodies and their hungers.
“Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body” chronicles how Gay turned to food for comfort after the rape, building her traumatized body into a fortress where she (mistakenly) imagined no one could hurt her again. When celebrated essayist and fiction writer Roxane Gay was 12 years old, she was raped by a group of neighborhood boys - a brutal attack she didn’t tell her Haitian-immigrant parents about for almost 30 years.
