Hunger
Ratings92
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings92
Average rating4.3
“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 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
“This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided. People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. They think they know the why of my body. They do not.”
It's definitely not a piece of writing that's left me cold. I have to mention that I can't quite stomach some things that Roxanne Gay says at certain points in this memoir, she is very angry about many things and lashes out by being very unfair and judgmental towards many people (I'm not talking about those who gave wronged her, I mean people who have literally nothing to do with what happened to her and who's biggest crime is to weigh less and not have had her traumatic experiences). Nonetheless this is not about my feelings, it's about hers and I can sympathize with what she's been and still going through and I can understand her anger and why she would find it hard to believe that most people are not horrible. I can respect her perspective, which is raw and disheartening but equally honest and important to hear.
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.
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