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Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
Zusammenfassung
From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad 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 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.
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Rezensionen
This memoir is raw and honest. It continues to confirm for the that various addictions - drugs, alcohol, sex, eating disorders - are all the same tune sung in different keys.
In beautiful prose and startling honesty, Gay writes a memoir that touches upon her rape as a child and her ongoing issues with weight. Along the way, she also discusses familial and romantic relationships, her career as a writer, and cultural issues that she sees in the way the world views overweight people.This was a very compelling read, although rather sadly poignant at times. For the audiobook version, Gay reads it herself, given an extra emotional resonance to her words. Her discussion of her challenges of moving about the world with an overweight body really helps readers develop more empathy and consideration towards others and the hurdles they may face. I had already been interested in reading some of this author's other books, and now want to do so even more.
This is a very raw memoir that begins when the author was 12 years old and gang-raped which led her to over-eat and eventually become morbidly obese, her body becoming a boundary and her protection from the outside world. In the memoir, the author describes her experience as a large person in a culture where we constantly fat-shame everyone who is more than a size zero. For the reader, it was an interesting, thought-provoking read.
Some memoir, some personal essay - Gay has a great voice that calms even through heartbreaking story.
This book was great. So many passages that really resonated with me. Roxane's experiences were similar yet very different to mine. I think so many people can read her book and feel that there is someone out there who understands them.
So many times I start a memoir that is recommended, only to find it is not as good as I hoped. This book is every bit as good as I hoped and even better than I expected.
So many times I start a memoir that is recommended, only to find it is not as good as I hoped. This book is every bit as good as I hoped and even better than I expected.
Wow! This memoir is fascinating. Roxane Gay tells her story in a way that I feel like I know her. She somehow takes the tragedies in her life and tells how she felt at the time and how if affects her now. She is an amazing writer and an even more amazing person. I'm glad she had the courage to tell her story. She narrates the audiobook which makes it very personal.
I cannot assess this book objectively. Roxane Gay speaks what's in my heart and mind despite the differences in our biographies or particular trajectories from childhood trauma to adult living. Beyond the emotional resonance, we are the same age and found refuge in so many of the same things (theater! the 90s internet! love of being in love!) that it is so easy to feel as if I know her like a friend, if I were able to be a friend to myself.
Beautiful and brutal and honest.
Prepare to be sad. There are funny and triumphant moments here, of course, but this book is primarily about vulnerability, heartbreak, and how they can mark a body for life. Roxane Gay was violated, traumatized, isolated and misunderstood, but also significantly heartbroken at that moment of childhood-stepping-into-womanhood when we probably wound most easily. In response, she embarked on a campaign to become too big to hurt. Gay reminds the reader that her story is unique, not intended as a universal narrative or a balm for those with similar experiences. As someone who has tried in many ways to be the opposite of big for most of my life, I can only say that I, too, found my reflection in Roxane.
What an intense journey; this left me gutted and without a lot to say even though my mind is churning.
Fair warning I listened to this book to fill a reading challenge requirement. Overall I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed the author reading her own work. But if I am being honest, if I was reading this I would never have finished. I too am a big woman. I’m still a Lane Bryant size (which is a thing in the book), but still. I have felt some of the things she has felt. You would think I would have liked the book better but I didn’t. And it has nothing to do with her story, or her writing, or what happens in its pages. It was very real and life altering, and I get that, it’s just not my type of story.I did become more interested when she talked about living in what i consider my home town. She was a faculty member at my alma mater, and working there around the time I has also just moved back home from Denver. Her descriptions of the places were so vivid, I know exactly what apartment complex she lived (even if I don’t know the apartment). I was so shocked because it is small town america and the university only has between 8,000-10,000 students. No one knows where EIU is (except for some very dedicated sports fans who remember we made the NCAA playoffs once).As the book progressed I enjoyed it more and more. As it became more about her life in general instead of mostly focused on her weight or her rape. I enjoyed the book more as she herself aged and learn to like herself more. I can very easily see, as her timeline progresses, how she goes from dread and hating herself, to dread, and even possibly love. The more she liked herself, the more I liked her book.And while, to be honest, I will probably never read a Roxanne Gay book, I think I just might be interested in listening to Bad Feminist. #booked2018
My Takeaway
"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."
Roxane Gay, Hunger
Hunger was raw, unfiltered, explicit, heartbreaking and extremely personal. There are a few explicit parts that were hard to read because they were so graphic, still, Gay's writing was phenomenal and incredibly honest. In this memoir, Gay articulately expressed her struggles with her weight, body, and self-image after being gang-raped at the age of 12. I can't praise Gay enough for being so brave and honest. Hunger definitely changed some of the misconceptions and views I held about overweight individuals. I highly recommend this book - especially to those who struggle with their body image. I had the pleasure and honor of meeting Roxane this past June. She was extremely funny, witty and quite shy!
"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."
Roxane Gay, Hunger
Hunger was raw, unfiltered, explicit, heartbreaking and extremely personal. There are a few explicit parts that were hard to read because they were so graphic, still, Gay's writing was phenomenal and incredibly honest. In this memoir, Gay articulately expressed her struggles with her weight, body, and self-image after being gang-raped at the age of 12. I can't praise Gay enough for being so brave and honest. Hunger definitely changed some of the misconceptions and views I held about overweight individuals. I highly recommend this book - especially to those who struggle with their body image. I had the pleasure and honor of meeting Roxane this past June. She was extremely funny, witty and quite shy!
Roxane Gay's Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is devastating, both as a personal memoir and as a critique of social attitudes towards overweight women. She traces her struggle with fat to time when, at age 12, she was gang raped by a boy she thought she was in love with and his friends. Gay believe she started packing on weight as a defense mechanism, an effort to make her unattractive to the opposite sex, but when the epithet "slut" continued to be thrown at her, she asked her parents to let her enroll in a private school. Here, she hoped that she could create a new identity, and she did: the Fat Girl. Thus began years of moving from one place to another, one relationship to another, in hopes of finding acceptance and--contradictorily--invisibility. As a six-foot tall black lesbian feminist who weighed over 575 pounds, this hasn't been an easy quest, and it still continues. In addition to her personal story, Gay explores social biases and pressure against obesity (especially for women), from reality shows like "The Biggest Loser," "Extreme Weight Loss," and "My 600-lb. Life," to celebrity endorsements of weight loss regimens like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers, to the reactions of strangers, ranging from stares of disgust to mocking insults. As someone who has struggled with weight for most of my life, I empathized with her claim that a fat person is never able to relax in public, to remove herself from her body and the feeling (or awareness?) that others are constantly seeing and judging her. I, too, have had those moments of self-hatred, of not daring to share the arm rest on a plane, of being self-conscious about what was in my grocery cart or on my plate in a restaurant. Ultimately, Gay comes to no conclusions. Hers is not a happy before-and-after weight loss story, nor is it a journey towards fat acceptance. If anything, it seeks to expose our society's focus on body image and the damage that can be done when we can't see the person because we allow ourselves to be blinded by the surface. And it chronicles Gay's own continuing efforts to rely on her strengths and positive qualities despite what others see.
Best for: Those who enjoy amazing writing, searing honesty, and vulnerability.
In a nutshell: Roxane Gay shares a memoir of her life, framed through her relationship with her body.
Line that sticks with me: There are too many to include all of them. But here’s one: “But the pain of a tattoo is something to which you have to surrender because once you’ve started, you cannot really go back or you’ll be left with something not only permanent but unfinished. I enjoy the irrevocability of that circumstance.” (p 186)
Why I chose it: It’s Roxane Gay. Come on.
Review: I was so anxious to read this that instead of visiting my regular bookstore I stopped at chain store in the middle of the work day in a town I happened to be passing through because I wanted to be able to start reading it at the first possible opportunity. Which turned out to be waiting in line at a coffee shop before a meeting. A meeting I was nearly late to because the writing and story are so compelling that I did not want to put it down.
Dr. Gay (Professor Gay? She has a PhD, so I want to acknowledge that properly) has written a memoir that is unlike any other I’ve read. It feels almost like poetry, as the 300 pages are split into nearly 90 chapters. Some chapters are but a paragraph long; others span multiple pages. The subject matter is challenging, but Prof. Gay’s language is not. As she provides some detail of her rape at a young age, the rape that she describes as a turning point that caused her to build up a physical distance between herself and others through weight gain, she manages to use language that is extremely uncomfortable and horrifying yet possible to read through.
The book focuses on her relationship with her body and what it is like to be in this world that does not value fat people, but it isn’t a laundry list of the challenges she faces. Yes, there are chapters about the frustrations she deals with when traveling, but Prof. Gay finds a way to discuss it that simultaneously points out all the ways people unintentionally — and intentionally — shun, punish, or otherwise seek to harm fat bodies AND remind us all that this is her experience. She isn’t a headless fat person on the evening news; she is a person who lives in this body, who deserves to be seen and respected. And we as a society — and individuals — fail at this. Hard. And often.
And people suffer because of it.
As Prof. Gay points out in the beginning, this is not a ‘before’ and ‘after’ story in the sense that you’ll see her holding up her old clothes and her new, skinny body. She is still a very fat woman. And she is still valuable, and worth love, respect, and basic human decency. She won’t be more of a person if she weighs less.
This is a book you should read. We live in a world where it is so easy to deny the humanity of those who are not like us. Even some of the progressive folks I know, who would never dare mock someone who is a different race, religion, or sexual orientation than themselves, still make shitty comments about fat people. Still used fat as an insult. Still take joy in seeing other people gain weight. And that’s really fucking shitty.
I hope you read this book.
In a nutshell: Roxane Gay shares a memoir of her life, framed through her relationship with her body.
Line that sticks with me: There are too many to include all of them. But here’s one: “But the pain of a tattoo is something to which you have to surrender because once you’ve started, you cannot really go back or you’ll be left with something not only permanent but unfinished. I enjoy the irrevocability of that circumstance.” (p 186)
Why I chose it: It’s Roxane Gay. Come on.
Review: I was so anxious to read this that instead of visiting my regular bookstore I stopped at chain store in the middle of the work day in a town I happened to be passing through because I wanted to be able to start reading it at the first possible opportunity. Which turned out to be waiting in line at a coffee shop before a meeting. A meeting I was nearly late to because the writing and story are so compelling that I did not want to put it down.
Dr. Gay (Professor Gay? She has a PhD, so I want to acknowledge that properly) has written a memoir that is unlike any other I’ve read. It feels almost like poetry, as the 300 pages are split into nearly 90 chapters. Some chapters are but a paragraph long; others span multiple pages. The subject matter is challenging, but Prof. Gay’s language is not. As she provides some detail of her rape at a young age, the rape that she describes as a turning point that caused her to build up a physical distance between herself and others through weight gain, she manages to use language that is extremely uncomfortable and horrifying yet possible to read through.
The book focuses on her relationship with her body and what it is like to be in this world that does not value fat people, but it isn’t a laundry list of the challenges she faces. Yes, there are chapters about the frustrations she deals with when traveling, but Prof. Gay finds a way to discuss it that simultaneously points out all the ways people unintentionally — and intentionally — shun, punish, or otherwise seek to harm fat bodies AND remind us all that this is her experience. She isn’t a headless fat person on the evening news; she is a person who lives in this body, who deserves to be seen and respected. And we as a society — and individuals — fail at this. Hard. And often.
And people suffer because of it.
As Prof. Gay points out in the beginning, this is not a ‘before’ and ‘after’ story in the sense that you’ll see her holding up her old clothes and her new, skinny body. She is still a very fat woman. And she is still valuable, and worth love, respect, and basic human decency. She won’t be more of a person if she weighs less.
This is a book you should read. We live in a world where it is so easy to deny the humanity of those who are not like us. Even some of the progressive folks I know, who would never dare mock someone who is a different race, religion, or sexual orientation than themselves, still make shitty comments about fat people. Still used fat as an insult. Still take joy in seeing other people gain weight. And that’s really fucking shitty.
I hope you read this book.
Hunger is so much more than a book about weight. Roxane Gay explains what her body went through, what her mind went through, and how that lead to her being here today. She is very vulnerable and I feel like it is a different side of her when compared to her voice in Bad Feminist, which I loved, but this one is more personal and pretty heartbreaking at times.
Benjamin Kalish21 hrs · Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is startling. It is moving and important. It is hard to read and hard to put down.In this memoir of her body Gay puts into words so much that would generally be left unsaid. Gay’s writing is clear and concise. It does not shy from the contradictions in life. It is both restrained and emotional. It is devastating. Gay tells us about her life. She was raped at the age of twelve. She is fat. She is scared. She is complex, intelligent, insightful, compassionate, and a brilliant writer. She lives a privileged life and recognizes her privilege. She is the subjected to great prejudice and discrimination. In Hunger she shares truths that must be incredibly difficult to share and she does so very well.Gay’s book tells us much about her life, but it also tells us much about our culture, our country, our attitudes. We are not kind to fat bodies. We are not kind to women’s bodies. We are not kind to black bodies. We are not kind to ourselves. You probably already know this, but Gay’s book will still open your eyes. Her perspective is probably not one you have heard before.On the back of the dust jacket Ann Patchett tells us why this book is important and I cannot improve on what she says. She writes:“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 amazing achievement in more ways than I can count.”
Hunger is so much more than a book about weight. Roxane Gay explains what her body went through, what her mind went through, and how that lead to her being here today. She is very vulnerable and I feel like it is a different side of her when compared to her voice in Bad Feminist, which I loved, but this one is more personal and pretty heartbreaking at times.
I love that this memoir is so honest. The author refuses to sugarcoat anything and leaves open the distinct possibility that she will never be able to heal from her trauma or lose weight. This is an important work because of that.The only flaw is that the author seems to repeat herself a lot. You're in her thirties, then you're back in her twenties covering the same ground. The book is very short; it seems as though the publisher is trying to spin it out into a big feminist treatise that they can charge $25 for, when you can read it in an hour and many pages don't cover 2/3 of a page in large font. It's a handful of essays, essentially. It doesn't come up to the mark as a memoir.It's excellent, nevertheless. Mesmerizing. Top-notch writing.
I love Roxane Gay. I have seen her speak and answer questions on 2 occasions and have seen her on TV and heard her on radio many times. I have always found her to be smart, and funny and to have a unique and not often heard POV. But (there is always a but) I have not really liked much of what I have read of hers. I haven't hated it, I just have not found it interesting or particularly insightful. More importantly, she portrays everything as Roxane against the world, and Roxane is always right. People look at you funny when you say that Bad Feminist was "fine" or "okay" but that is how I felt. I liked some of it but felt more of it was obvious or unoriginal and thought a good deal was arrogant and presumptuous. So Hunger was a surprise, an amazing surprise. Every one of the thousand+ times I have heard someone say that a person was brave to write a book or give a strong performance I have rolled my eyes hard enough to end up with a substantial headache. So I forgive anyone who reads this and rolls their eyes when I say that Roxane Gay was incredibly brave to write this book. She has done something painful to help others, and has done so at considerable risk to herself. Hunger speaks aloud so many things that are seemingly never spoken; it tells a story so many people have to tell, and yet never do. As a fellow fat chick so much of the writing about interacting with the world resonated with me. It is true that in our world being fat makes you invisible, genderless, sexless. It is true that many of us insulate ourselves from rejection and fear with fat at the same time as we know that fat brings on other rejection and breeds other fear. Much of Roxane's story is nothing like mine, but the radical honesty of the parts that parallel my own existence assures me that she has bared all in the other sections as well. If the greatest thing about reading is the opportunity to build empathy (and I think it is) this is a great book.Listened to this read by the author, and the immediacy of her telling her own story enhanced the experience, I recommend the audiobook.
Beautifully narrated. Like listening to an old friend.
This book evoked so many feelings in me and had me on the cusp of tears more than once. I've never read anything like it. Everyone should read this book.
What an intense journey; this left me gutted and without a lot to say even though my mind is churning.
Roxane Gay is an amazingly intelligent and articulate feminist author and teacher, yet she comes across in this book as a very damaged, very fragile, very obsessed woman. Probably the first thing most people notice about Gay is her weight - at one time more than 500 pounds, now somewhere in the 200s or 300s. She's big. The fact that she's so many things other than big seems to constantly escape her mind. She was gang raped by friends of her boyfriend at the age of 12 and now, more than 30 years later keeps obsessing about that rape and blames it for her hunger. It's good to show the world that rape has long lasting consequences, but must it ruin one's life forever? Gay is intelligent and articulate, as I mentioned but also respected and loved not just by the general public but personally loved by friends, family and romantic partners. Yet she is massively masochistic. She describes a very bad fracture that she experienced and states that sometimes when a person is in pain only more, even severe pain can lead them to change and heal. She thinks her compound fracture lead her to heal. I wonder how much more damage she will need to inflict on herself before she can stop. I found this a very disturbing book, and I don't see how the writing of it was beneficial to women in general or to her personally. I think maybe it was just another way for her to hurt herself.
This book is exactly like having dinner with Roxane Gay while you just shut up and listen intently. I cannot imagine sharing my own innermost secrets and shame with an international audience, albeit in such a calm, reasonable, and resonant voice. Although the devastating fact of her rape and subsequent collapse of self are alluded to throughout, there is not one extra word here. She calls her body "unruly" and herself "a woman of size". I say Roxane Gay is a woman of tremendous stature and a writer of such talent that it is difficult to imagine anyone who could improve on this effort. Or anyone who could write a more horrendous story, although it's probably not uncommon. This needs to be required reading for every woman. Although men would also truly benefit from the book as well, I fear that their probable lack of identification with Gay's saga might make it just another sad story to them, and perhaps unworthy of their gaze. But really, I don't care, as long as women grasp the enormity of what lack of power entails and destroys.
This book was haunting and inspiring at the same time. I have been waiting to write a review of it because I am afraid my words won't do it justice. Roxane Gay is a true force of not only words but life. This book holds up a mirror to existence and dares the reader to not only live harder but look deeper at yourself and decide how you choose to exist in the world.
I actually had to keep rereading it sentence by sentence because there was so much written that I thought had come from me and I had to remember that no, I had not written this amazing work.
I actually had to keep rereading it sentence by sentence because there was so much written that I thought had come from me and I had to remember that no, I had not written this amazing work.
Roxane Gay's book about what it's like to live in the world as an obese woman approaches the experience from both universal and starkly personal angles. She's so honest and unflinching in her examination of her own weight, as well as why she is fat, that the book is often difficult to read; I felt that I really shouldn't be privy to such personal information. But Gay is unable to not be completely open, and it's that rawness that makes this book so powerful. Gay ties her very personal experience to the wider one of how society treats larger women, pulling from her own life to demonstrate how ill-equipped and judgmental we are of people who we perceive as lacking control, and especially of women who take up more space than they should. Gay is also a tall woman, at 6'3" making her even more conspicuous than she would be at an average height, making ordinary things difficult, from airline seats to finding clothes. While she was on a book tour for this book, she traveled to Australia and did an interview with a website which subsequently wrote an article about the unique problems accommodating Gay's size posed for them, from having to find a sturdy chair to the onerous task of checking how many pounds the elevator could carry. It was amazing how very much a publication which intended to be sympathetic missed the mark and the whole sordid tale proved Gay's points. It should be noted that had this company planned an interview with a man of similar size, they would have gone about their preparations with a great deal less hysteria and certainly never considered it fodder for an article.
Today I'm going to attempt to form some coherent thoughts about my experience reading Roxane Gay's newest book entitled Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. Some of you might have already had this book on your radar because of the huge amount of press that it got right after its release. This is an extremely personal account of Roxane's experiences as an obese woman in our society (which is obsessed with being skinny as you know). However, it's less a commentary on that than a self-exploration of her relationship with food and her body. You might recognize Gay's name from my review of her frank assessment of feminism and how she identifies herself (not just as a feminist but all-around human). I thought that she had pushed the envelope with her openness and willingness to 'go there' with that book but reading Hunger was a whole new experience. For one thing, this isn't a book about the trials and tribulations of being overweight in America and how she's planning on using this book as a tool to get her life back on track. No, this is a cathartic exercise in purging some of the darkness that she has had buried inside for too long. (I'm trying to not give away too much because her writing of the events of her life is kinda the whole point of the book.) This book will make you rethink the way that you look at your own body and how you make assumptions about other people based on their bodies. It is not meant to be preachy or shaming. It's one woman opening up about a horrific experience in her life and how that changed her forever. I think this is the kind of book that everyone should read because it opens your eyes to yourself, to others, and makes you think. 9/10 definitely recommend
One of the bravest book I have ever read. Roxane Gay lays it out all the pain and ugliness she has endured.
Roxane Gay has achieved a lot in her life--she has a PhD and is a New York Times bestselling author--but in her mind she's still "the girl in the woods", the vulnerable twelve year old who was gang-raped by her "boyfriend" and his pals. As the result of this trauma, she over-ate to turn herself into a "fortress" so that she could not be hurt again. Even now, although she's down from her all-time high weight, she writes that her size poses many practical problems, such as finding chairs that are sturdy enough for her to sit on. Even worse are her awkward encounters with well-meaning people who pull things out of her grocery cart or offer unsolicited diet and exercise tips. On top of that, she is prone to bad relationships, self-defeating behavior, and self-loathing.Hunger is Gay's memoir of the difficult times in her life. At times it reads like an extended therapy session. By the end it seems as though she has reached an uneasy truce with her body and her life, but there is no tidy resolution of her issues with food and relationships. Recommended for the many people, especially women, who will be able to relate to Gay's conflicted relationship with her body.
This is not an easy read to stomach, but it does have a powerful message about finding your voice.