The story of my life is wanting, hungering, for what I cannot have or, perhaps, wanting what I dare not allow myself to have. Further still, she examines how “healthy” and “happy” are linked in society’s preconceived notions of these ideas and how they apply specifically to women. Ranging from camps to diets to even eating disorders, Gay takes us through her battle with mental and physical health, familiar pressures to be thin and excellent, and what being “healthy” actually means. Her weight gain, her classification as “morbidly obese” is traumatic in and of itself due to the way society - especially medical professionals - treats someone her size. While this event happened when she was 12, Gay, now 42, writes how she continues to struggle with the aftermath: of not being able to trust, of how she needs the comfort her size gives her, and how hard it is to love.īut it’s not just the sexual trauma that Gay works through in her memoir.
In an unflinching account of her childhood rape, Gay offers the catalyst in her weight gain. A hunger for healing, not just in the sense of her body, but in her mind, as well. And while Gay touches on food in her memoir, there is a deeper hunger for something else - something more - that is the undercurrent in each section and in each chapter. When we consider the word “hunger,” we associate it first and foremost with food. What Roxane Gay presents in her debut memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, is not this type of survival. We want to be fed the idea that we, too, can rise from our downfalls, pick ourselves up, and that everything does, in fact, get better.
There is a certain formula to “survival” or “addiction” memoirs that, if you’re fluent with the genre, you know well: writer is fine, writer falls, writer hits rock bottom, and then his story finishes with how not only he’s survived what he’s been through, but how he’s “healed.” We are looking to see how survivors are phoenixes, rising from the ashes of their self-destruction.