Hunger in particular explores childhood trauma, obesity, feminism, race and relationships, making for difficult but necessary reading.
I was a mess and then I grew up and away from that terrible day and became a different kind of mess-a woman doing the best she can to love well and be loved well, to live well and be human and good.”Īlso the author of Bad Feminist and Difficult Women, Gay consistently tackles volatile subjects in her writing. It’s ultimately a challenging book to describe, and Hunger’s through line is best explained by Gay’s writing itself: “When I was twelve years old I was raped and then I ate and ate and ate to build my body into a fortress. Yet saying that Gay’s memoir, Hunger, recounts her life is an oversimplification of the text. “Here I offer mine with a memoir of my body and my hunger.” What follows are 300 pages of pain, honesty, trauma, joy, loneliness, wisdom, despair and power that chronicle Gay’s life. “Every body has a story and a history,” Roxane Gay writes in her new book.
