Hunger
2017 • 306 pages
Ratings45
Average rating4.2
15
Ratings45
Average rating4.2
“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.”
In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.
With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.
Reviews with the most likes.
I've known the snippets of her story she's shared in her essays and in Bad Feminist, but I'm glad she gave voice to her full story about her day to day struggles and the history/mental states that got her here. Despite not having such an unruly body, I've always believed it to be, and shared exact understanding and empathy around the many mind-traps she described. This book will help people, both those that understand and those that need to.
I loved this book and tore through it in 3 days. Just really captivating, honest, raw writing. Roxane Gay is irrevocably shaped by her trauma, and we wish it had never happened, but it did and she is and that also might be OK. It made me feel better about the way I live with the trauma I experienced as a teenager, which similarly shaped me and sent me trying to protect myself in destructive ways but also makes me, me. I loved it
Hunger is an extremely raw memoir with many passages that have stuck with me almost a year later. I probably think of this book weekly, at the very least, if not more often than that. Gay is incredibly honest and straightforward. She doesn't shy away from any uncomfortable fact.
Speaking of comfort... it's incredibly uncomfortable to rate a book like this. I think the subject matter is very important. I think anyone who has never carried extra weight needs to read this book. There are things you would never consider that are on the minds of fat people every moment of every day. To rate the topic is wrong, in my opinion. I'm rating the organization and writing. While I think it was good, I think people will find it a little bit repetitive and maybe start to glaze over the importance of the message after a while. That being said, I have no idea how to improve it. I think it was great and powerful.
