Gay believes she gained weight so her body would become “a safe harbor rather than a small, weak vessel that betrayed me.” Her weight gain was for safety-so she would become repulsive to men and therefore, be safe from the damage they threaten. I resonate with her unhappiness with her body. That I would remove myself from the narrative, to ensure it was Gays’ voice I was hearing, not my own. For 141 pages I told myself I would not insert myself into this review. The lack of honesty became distance between Gay and her parents, and this distance was a “haunting, lonely feeling, thinking you don’t belong with the very people who know you in the truest, deepest ways.” When she reunited with her family she was able to take in the “breathtaking spectacle of this family, the beautiful beast we become when we are together.” Still, Gay felt she could not be completely honest with them.
She ran away from her family halfway through her undergraduate degree to live in Arizona with a man she met online, for what she calls her “lost” year. Gay believes “everything good and strong about me starts with my parents, absolutely everything.” After enduring such trauma as a 12-year-old she could no longer hide and pretend to be the “good Catholic daughter” her parents had raised. Despite the terrible, hideous things that happened to Gay, her family kept her grounded and fought for her-even when she failed to recognize it. Struggles with weight and her history with sexual violence aside, Gay makes one thing clear: she has a deep love for her family. Gay realized this when she registered how often “he said” matters more than “she said.” She became fully aware of this sad truth when she “finally did say no. As stories of sexual violence are shared more openly, the truth that sometimes “no” does not matter becomes increasingly apparent. Despite the sexual violence she endured, she is “stronger than is broken.” Gay also describes what it means to say no and not be heard.
I am a victim who survived.” Gay highlights that having a history of sexual violence is common, and she only shares her story so that those who read it can be “appropriately horrified” by how sexual violence can tear a person apart. She is only “one woman who has experienced something countless women have experienced. Something terrible did happen, Gay is a victim of sexual violence-though she says she is not brave, heroic, or strong, or special.
#COPIES OF HUNGER ROXANE GAY SOLD FULL#
Of her rape, Gay says it is easier to say, “something terrible happened,” but this negates the full truth, and this book provided her the means to “voice what I could not say out loud. Her book is brutally honest about her body and the many ways it has been “broken”-her gang rape as a 12-year-old, her quest to gain as much weight as possible, and living in a world where that weight is not acceptable. Roxane Gay is no stranger to sharing stories about her life, her assault, and her trauma. Or maybe it’s that their stories are important and deserve to be said, screamed and shouted from rooftops, so people listen. There’s something special to be said about people who share such intimate things about themselves maybe that they share too much. “It’s such a hard read but so worth it.” I put off reading it for over a year-perhaps because I knew it would be so difficult to read. “She’s so honest about her trauma,” Hailey told me. I picked up books I still haven’t read, and Ash picked up a copy of a book I pretended I had read.Ī few weeks later, Hailey begged me to read Hunger. She dragged Ashley and me to the closest Barnes and Noble so she could pick up her copy. Hailey told me about Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body the day after it released.