Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

  At times this was a difficult book to read and it is even more difficult to write about.

At age 12 Roxane Gay was raped by a group of boys, one of whom she had thought was her friend. For years she told no one. Instead Roxane turned to food. She began putting on weight to shield herself against the world, thinking that making herself less attractive would protect herself from dangerous men. Per the subtitle, Hunger is a memoir of Roxane Gay’s body, but really it is a memoir of her trauma. The trauma of her rape. The trauma of being overweight in a world that does not wish to try to accommodate overweight people.

I have mixed feeling about this book. I appreciate the raw honesty of the writing. She has been hurt and continues to hurt. But the story gets repetitive fairly quickly. Bad things and bad people happen to Roxane and she feels terrible. Good things happen to her and she feels like she doesn’t deserve it and self-sabotages. Good people happen to her and she pushes them away. Sometimes you can recognize a problem exists and even recognize that you're not handling it well but can't quite get yourself to act differently or to really address the problem. Hunger is all about that.

This is not a story of overcoming or of a triumph. It is not a hopeful story. I applaud Gay’s courage in telling this story but at the same time hope and wish that one day she can tell a happier story about herself. By happier I don’t mean a story where she loses a bunch of weight, but one in which she actually deals with her trauma and builds a life and a body that she can be content with. This book I think, and hope, is a step in that direction.