‘Affirmative Action,’ he sneered, unable to swallow the bitter truth that I, a black girl, had achieved something that he could not.” There were years of loneliness, body-shaming and racism - Gay includes an anecdote from when she opened her acceptance letter to Yale within eyeshot of a white male peer: “He looked at me with plain disgust. I needed to feel like a fortress, impermeable.” There were bouts with illness and a summer away at weight loss camp, but each time she lost weight she would undo what was outwardly perceived as progress in order “to make my body bigger and bigger and bigger and safer.” “The fat,” Gay writes, “created a new body, one that shamed me but one that made me feel safe, and more than anything, I desperately needed to feel safe. “When you are overweight in a Haitian family, your body is a family concern.” And so began years of her parents engaging in crisis management - Gay’s body being the crisis.Īt 13, just one year after the assault, Gay goes away to private school (Phillips Exeter Academy), where she indulges in her love of books and discovers an affinity for theater but struggles with the trauma she has shared with no one, and subsequently, eats. As Gay began to put on weight, though, it became a serious problem.
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“Food offered comfort when I needed to be comforted and did not know how to ask for what I needed from those who loved me.” The daughter of middle-class Haitian immigrants, Gay and her two younger brothers were raised in Nebraska as Haitian American kids, well loved and provided for, with a reverence for their heritage and a healthy attitude toward food.
Indeed, Gay does know why she turned to food. Or I do.” Usually, it’s the latter that becomes her sustained reality, but there is also the sense that one reality could not exist without the other - a crucible of warring reflections. Or I do.” “I do not have an answer to that question, or I do.” “This is no way to live but this is how I live.” “I wish I knew why. In several instances, Gay drops a spare but searing existential paradox: “I do not know why I turned to food. “Those boys treated me like nothing so I became nothing.”And yet there is not a single moment throughout the book when this statement rings irrefutably true, which is to say Gay’s mighty strength of character, sapient insights, deep and abiding love from and for her family (“We’re always tied together with our eyes and our lips and our blood and our bloody hearts”) are, to my mind the very opposite of nothingness.īut that’s what is also remarkable about this book, and which also serves as an ongoing theme from chapter to chapter: It is, and it isn’t. Her candor and self-awareness are necessary and reliable guides for the poignantly afflicted journey from a happy, pretty girl in a loving family to “a thing, flesh and girl bones” used, broken and discarded by a teenage boy and his friends. The critical beauty of “Hunger” is that Gay is so much smarter than everyone who has judged her based on her appearance, which she manages to convey without airs or ever actually stating this as fact. Roxane Gay appears in Los Angeles on Monday June 26 tickets are $32 - $55. “This is a book,” she writes, “about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight, when you are not obese or morbidly obese but super morbidly obese.” What evolves from there is a bracingly vivid account of how intellect, emotion and physicality speak to each other and work in tireless tandem to not just survive unspeakable hurt, but to create a life worth living and celebrating. Gay, who rose to literary stardom in 2014 with her cheeky, brilliant bestselling collection of essays, “Bad Feminist,” has written powerfully and often for various publications about gender, race, identity, pop culture and personal politics, but “Hunger” is the first book-length piece of writing that focuses explicitly on her weight.
Such is the case for Roxane Gay, whose latest work, “Hunger,” is a memoir of her body and how she has lived in and with it since surviving a horrible act of violence. If you are a woman, of any race, it’s nearly impossible not to internalize this mainstream mantra of emaciation as the end goal, but if preempted and perpetuated by sexual assault, a woman’s body can become the towering embodiment of exquisite pain. Because apart from money, thinness is the country’s most valued and desired currency. Like the majority of women in America, I think about nearly every piece of food that I put into my mouth.