Hunger roxane gay read online
Publisher Description
From the Fresh York Times bestselling author of Lousy Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.
“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 trendy essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about sustenance and body, using her own sentimental and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her hold 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 aim in her
Hunger
There are things I verb to do with my body but cannot. If I am with friends, I cannot store up, so I am constantly thinking up excuses to explain why I am walking slower than they are, as if they don’t already comprehend. Sometimes, they pretend not to recognize, and sometimes, it seems like they are genuinely that oblivious to how different bodies transfer and take up space as they look back at me and offer we do doomed things like travel to an amusement park or step a mile up a hill to a stadium or go hiking to an overlook with a great view.
My body is a cage. My body is a cage of my own making. I am still trying to figure my way out of it. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than twenty years.
8
In writing about my body, maybe I should explore this flesh, the abundance of it, as a crime scene. I should examine this corporeal effect to judge the cause.
I don’t wish to think of my body as a crime scene. I don’t wish to think of my body as something gone horribly wrong, something that should be cordoned off and explore
Buy the book
IndieBound, Powell&#;s City of Books, iBooks, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Amazon
Praise
It turns out that when a wrenching past is confronted with wisdom and bravery, the outcome can be compassion and enlightenment—both for the reader who has lived through this kind of unimaginable pain and for the reader who knows nothing of it. Roxane Gay shows us how to be decent to ourselves, and decent to one another. HUNGER is an astounding achievement in more ways than I can count.
Ann Patchett, Commonwealth and Bel Canto
At its simplest, it’s a memoir about being overweight — Gay’s preferred term — in a hostile, fat-phobic world. At its most symphonic, it’s an intellectually rigorous and deeply moving exploration of the ways in which trauma, stories, noun, language and metaphor shape our experiences and construct our reality.
New York Times
Wrenching, deeply moving. . . a memoir that’s so fearless, so raw, it feels as if [Gay]’s entrusting you with her soul
Seattle Times
Gay turns to memoir in this powerful reflection on her childhood traumas…Timely and resonant, you can
Four reasons Hunger is such a vital book
Gay exposes her life with an unflinching honesty that – ultimately – helps to provide salvation, which is all the more remarkable given that Hunger revolves around a shocking incident Gay spent decades trying to suppress.
Photo credit: Eva Blue
She writes to share the story of her body – specifically, how her body changed from being that of an average year-old lady to one that, at its heaviest, weighed pounds. She is explicit about the emotional – and physical – pain of living in the world when you are “super morbidly obese”, according to your body mass index.
2. Sometimes it’s okay to acknowledge you are a victim
She wound up as a “woman of size” because she “began eating to change her body” after a lad she loved, plus several of his friends, raped her in a cabin in the woods when she was just
Being raped, she writes, prompted Gay to adjust her body because she wanted to create a barrier against the lie down of the world. “I knew I wouldn’t be fit