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What it argues
Hunger is Roxane Gay's memoir of her body — how it came to be the way it is, what she has thought about it, and what it means to live in a body that the world reads as a problem to be solved. The book centers on a gang rape Gay experienced at age twelve, perpetrated by a boy she trusted and his friends, and how that event shaped her relationship with her body in the years after. She describes making herself larger — eating, gaining weight — as a way of making herself less vulnerable, less visible to sexual predators, less the kind of body that invites the kind of attention that preceded the assault. The reasoning was not fully conscious at the time, but the pattern was real.
Gay is direct about what followed: decades of complicated eating, a body that drew comment and cruelty from strangers, medical experiences in which her weight was treated as the primary fact about her regardless of what she had come in for, and the specific exhaustion of existing in public when the culture is continuously explicit that a body like hers is a failure. She does not claim to have resolved these things. The memoir is not a recovery narrative. It is a document of ongoing experience written from inside it.
What it gets right
- 1.
Bodies can be shaped by trauma in ways that have logic — Gay made herself large to be less of a target — even when the logic never enters conscious thought.
- 2.
Fat bodies are one of the last categories that receive unsolicited commentary and cruelty in public and professional contexts without cultural sanction against it.
- 3.
Not every trauma has a resolution. Gay is explicit that understanding why her relationship with her body is what it is has not changed what it is.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, and cultural critic. She is the author of the essay collection Bad Feminist, the novel An Untamed State, and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. She has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications, and has taught at Purdue University and other institutions. Hunger, published in 2017, is her memoir. Gay is known for her direct, politically engaged prose and her willingness to hold complexity without resolving it.
