Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay (Epub)

Description

A best book of 2017: Time NPR People Elle The Washington Post The Los Angeles Times The Chicago Tribune Newsday St. Louis Post-Dispatch PopSugar BookRiot Library Journal Booklist Kirkus Reviews Shelf Awareness

New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, 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 casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life.

With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and tells a story that hasn’t yet been told but needs to be.

User’s Reviews

Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of June 2017: If you’re a woman in America, chances are, no matter your size, you probably have a somewhat fetishistic relationship with food. We obsess over having too much, too little (to a lesser degree); we use terms like stealing a bite and guilty pleasure–things that evoke shame, and are meant to keep our bodies in line. For those that fit that (ever narrowing) bill, congratulations! Clothes are designed to fit you, kale growers love you, and so does society. You bask in its glow. The rest risk being in shadow, which is exactly where Roxane Gay wanted to be. In her brutally honest and brave memoir Hunger, Gay recounts a childhood sexual assault that led her to purposely gain weight in order to be unseen and therefore “safe.” Gay warns at the beginning of the book that if you’re looking for a triumphant weight loss memoir, this is not it. But Hunger is a triumph nonetheless. It’s a story not easily told, but the telling set her free. And through Gay’s experience we learn one of lessons she eventually did, that “all of us have to be more considerate of the realities of the bodies of others,” and more accepting of our own. –Erin Kodicek, The Amazon Book Review Review “A gripping book, with vivid details that linger long after its pages stop. . . . Hunger is arresting and candid. At its best, it affords women, in particular, something so many other accounts deny them—the right to take up space they are entitled to, and to define what that means.” — Atlantic“A work of staggering honesty . . . . Poignantly told.” — New Republic“The book’s short, sharp chapters come alive in vivid personal anecdotes. . . . And on nearly every page, Gay’s raw, powerful prose plants a flag, facing down decades of shame and self-loathing by reclaiming the body she never should have had to lose.” — Entertainment Weekly“Bracingly vivid. . . . Remarkable. . . . Undestroyed, unruly, unfettered, Ms. Gay, live your life. We are all better for having you do so in the same ferociously honest fashion that you have written this book.” — Los Angeles Times“Searing, smart, readable. . . . “Hunger,” like Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” interrogates the fortunes of black bodies in public spaces. . . . Nothing seems gratuitous; a lot seems brave. There is an incantatory element of repetition to “Hunger”: The very short chapters scallop over the reader like waves.” — Newsday“Luminous. . . . intellectually rigorous and deeply moving.” — The New York Times Book Review“Her spare prose, written with a raw grace, heightens the emotional resonance of her story, making each observation sharper, each revelation more riveting. . . . It is a thing of raw beauty.” — USA Today“Powerful. . . . fierce. . . . Gay has a vivid, telegraphic writing style, which serves her well. Repetitive and recursive, it propels the reader forward with unstoppable force.” — Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers“This is the book to read this summer . . . she’s such a compelling mind . . . . Anyone who has a body should read this book.” — Isaac Fitzgerald on the Today show“Unforgettable. . . . Breathtaking. . . . We all need to hear what Gay has to say in these pages. . . . Gay says hers is not a success story because it’s not the weight-loss story our culture demands, but her breaking of her own silence, her movement from shame and self-loathing toward honoring and forgiving and caring for herself, is in itself a profound victory.” — San Francisco Chronicle

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ That is my own measly opinion, of course. I think this book left people confused on either end of the spectrum, in different ways. I’ve read 1-star ratings calling it boring, disappointing, circular, with no light at the end of the tunnel; the memoir of a very unlikable human being who gets nowhere in this book.Like it’s meant to be some kind of fairy tale, or the lesson to be learned is meant to leave the reader feeling accomplished and good. Like wisdom always feels good or something.Or the 5-star ratings that praise this as though it’s this suspenseful and emotionally captivating read—which I personally feel is misleading and such a misrepresentation of why this book exists.”LOVE IT!!!” feels cheap. Calling this book amazing feels like a lie.When I started reading Hunger, I knew I was going into a memoir that was probably going to feel very uncomfortable; both in just reading about the real trauma a real person had experienced, and the fact that I have also suffered trauma. I am also obese and have experienced the fear of losing weight for the same reasons the author has and does. I get it and I felt myself bearing down and then a dull sense of disturbance fill my stomach as I got closer to what I knew lived in the pages of this memoir.I read a life that seemed very similar to mine; at a certain point I even felt a sting of annoyance that someone wrote down my story and got the success that I probably could’ve had a long time ago. I lived this life, in my own ways—so much of it was terribly familiar to me. Some moments mirrored my own, and some situations I couldn’t even begin to imagine myself in.I’m wondering if those who got nothing out of this really missed the point of what Roxane’s memoir is. She’s not here to teach us a moral, or to leave us feeling empowered in our obesity, or giving anyone a sense of moral high ground.This memoir reads as a practice in pure catharsis—an attempt at validating her own traumas and seeing how it latched onto her and changed her perception of herself. It’s not about the reader and really whatever they’re hoping to get out of it; Roxane is showing us the very experiences that closely reflect those similar to her.Yes, it is redundant because trauma doesn’t just go away. Trauma follows and manifests over and over again, however the brain makes it until the person is able to resolve it. That resolution, though?—sometimes it never shows up. Sometimes, trauma looks like decades of just eating, chatting online, the same list of stupid choices, failed jobs and grades, evictions, severed relationships, and the same relationships that hurt someone the first time the trauma happened.Years upon years of the same BS, neverending. Always going. And for an obese person—an obese woman of color—Roxane Gay’s memoir is chronic and endemic, and it’s deeply disturbing and can feel the reader with hopelessness.Some readers found this book boring because it just repeated the same things over and over. They lost interest. They ask, “What is in this for me? I want my money back! DO NOT READ, EVERYONE.”If this book is anything, it is a practice in empathy for those whose lives have been debilitated and left in Limbo by the foul choices of others—even children, as Roxane Gay had been victim to. And in saying that, I will say that from my perspective, the people complaining about how bored they were and how disappointed that they didn’t get any helpful advice or “wisdom” out of this memoir completely failed in that practice.Welcome to trauma. Welcome to sexual trauma. Welcome to rape. Welcome to PTSD. Welcome to eating disorders. And welcome to all of those things, wrapped up into a life that spent years being unresolved, misunderstood, unnoticed, invalidated, and left to rot—all because anyone could see was that Roxane Gay was fat.

⭐ The title of this book is perfect. Anyone, who knows who Roxane Gay is, will assume the book has to do with eating. Hunger connotes a desire for food, right? But, this book is much more than a book about food. It’s a book about yearning, about hungering for many things. Food is, of course, one of those things. But, Ms. Gay hungers for companionship, for love, for acceptance, for simple courtesy. She hungers for recognition of who she is versus what she looks like. In fact, there is little in the book that indicates that she hungers for food.This is a troubling book to read. It’s full of angst. The short chapters feel as if each could be a confessional on a shrink’s couch. The author shares her innermost wants, needs, feelings. It is so revealing that the reader feels as if they are intruding. The courage it took to write the book is evident. But, what’s not so evident but clear is how much the author had to go deep within herself to really understand who she was. I’m assuming she did that alone and not in therapy. She doesn’t mention being in therapy (except some counseling when she was in high school). Given all the revelations in the book, the reader begins to search his or her own soul. In doing that, we might ask ourselves, do we really see others? Do we assume by what we see in other people’s appearance (bodies), they are a certain way without knowing that person. Are we subconsciously critical of people who are fat (anorexic, old, handicapped–my additions)? Ms. Gay helps the reader understand the difficulty she has doing very normal things, like going out to dinner with friends, going to the doctor, using a public restroom, flying in an airplane, sitting behind the steering wheel of a car, going to a movie or the theatre. The list is endless. I can add others: Serving on jury duty, walking on a sidewalk, sitting on a park bench. Those of us in normal-sized bodies take all these things for granted. After having read Hunger, I will never take these things for granted again.Hunger is a tough read. My hope is the process of writing it helped Ms. Gay deal with her own deep-seated, long-standing traumas. In the meantime, I will never look at an overweight person in the same way. That much I gained from this book.The book is not a slow read. The chapters are quickly devoured. The sentences short with much repetition. The emotion high.

⭐ I have a lot of complaints about this book, but I’m just going to focus on one: Near the end of the text Roxane Gay admits to virtually stalking a man who raped her as a child. Instead of contacting the police or warning her community about a sexual predator, she decides she would rather keep tabs on him from afar. She explains that she is not afraid of him, and is not silent on his identity because of her personal trauma. Rather, she basks in the power she wields – she’s titillated by his fate being subject to her whim.I’m disappointed that a self-proclaimed feminist chooses to risk the safety of others for her own personal satisfaction. Rape is not a game, but she sure as hell treats it like one. She even muses if he’s raped other little girls, but her curiosity is uncaring and crass. This book is about herself, with no traces of empathy or compassion. I found her bland as a writer and disgusting as a human.

⭐ I read this book in one sitting. No possible way that anything could stand in the way of Roxane Gay’s collection, “Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body”! I sobbed through each essay as Gay revealed her depth and each secret was stripped and empowered on the page! This is by far the fiercest and most unforgettable memoir I have read to date! Some quotes:”My warmth was hidden far from anything that could bring hurt because I knew I didn’t have the inner scaffolding to endure anymore hurt in those protected places.””Do my boundaries exist if I don’t voice them?””The thing about shame is that there are no depths. I have no idea where the bottom of my shame resides.””There is a price to be paid for visibility and there is even more of a price to be paid when you are hypervisible.”Make sure when you get a copy that you have time to read it through because you will not want to do anything else! LOVE LOVE Roxane Gay! This is her most powerful work to date!

⭐ I really wanted to love this book. I respect the author. I champion the cause. From the intro i was fully warned that it would not be something with a “happy ending” so I wasn’t expecting that. But it seemed like she said the same story over and over again. Each time around the cycle I kept hoping there would be just a bit more awareness or some kind of insight. But it just never happened. It felt like one long complaint – with no door in – the author essentially shoots down any possible way the reader can connect.

⭐ This was not an easy book to read, especially if you are struggling with weight issues. The author writes beautifully of her struggle with her body after being raped at the age of 12. Her way of keeping men away was go gain weight. At one point in this book she weighed 511 pounds. She has struggled since the age of 12 and she details the diets, the comments, the bullying. Her story is beautifully told but it offers no real answers, no solutions to the problems of weight. The chapters are very short and many will identify with the author. At the end of the book she seems to accept the fact (as many of us do) the loosing weight is a struggle with no real end it sight. The author has accomplished a lot in spite of the trauma and her story is compelling.

⭐ The author is a fascinating person and she contends with some mighty themes in this book. Unfortunately, this book didn’t seem to me to be quite ready for publication. Despite the gravity of the author’s experiences, the book felt emotionally superficial and it seemed especially undecided about the main topic: her eating. She explains her excessive eating as the result of being raped as a young girl by a boy that she thought cared about her. It’s a harrowing experience, whose trauma lingers in many ways. I feel bad about criticizing the book but, if we judge it as a work of literature rather than a sort of simple testimony, it fails to find in her experience something that other people can relate to, even those who have shared some of her experiences. One feels that Gay is still a bit mystified by herself and her experiences and has some way to go to figuring herself out, or, put another way, to reaching some level of self-awareness that could reach outside the fog of continuing self-punishment. One wishes her fortitude, strength, love, and self-acceptance.

⭐ This story is one woman’s story but it is also the story of many “women of size”, whether their journey started with sexual trauma, emotional trauma, or just being “big boned” as my grandmother said. The authors writing style is relatable and compelling. I never shied away from even the most painful parts of this book. I felt myself wanting to hold space for her. To hold space for myself. To hold space for all the women who can relate to this story. She offers valid criticisms of the weight loss industry and our culture’s incessant fat hatred. She offers a cry of anguish for those of us who have incorporated that hatred into self hatred. And she ultimately offers a glimmer of hope that can be found when we take those first steps toward honoring our bodies, toward loving our bodies. That journey may be even harder than all the the other things we have endured, but it is the one path toward peace. Learning self compassion, for our own selves and for our “unruly bodies” can offer all of us a new way of seeing ourselves. I will not forget this book and will probably return to parts of it again and again.

⭐ Roxanne Gay is one of my favorite writers. Yet I never expected to be haunted by this book. So many truths about the body, a black woman’s body, a Caribbean American woman’s body.The short paragraphs do not always make the book easier to read but they offer a chance to reflect on the sad truth that the body is what matters. I cannot recommend this book to eternal optimists for there isn’t a neatly wrapped bow at the end. There is, however, truth, which is by far a greater gift.

⭐ I couldn’t finish this book. It went round and round in circles, repeating the same thing every chapter using slightly different words. So strange! It was also incredibly choppy. I’m sorry I cannot recommend this book at all.

Keywords

Free Download Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body in Epub format
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body Epub Free Download
Download Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body 2017 Epub Free
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body 2017 Epub Free Download
Download Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body Epub
Free Download Ebook Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body