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

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Ebook Info

  • Published: 2017
  • Number of pages: 270 pages
  • Format: PDF
  • File Size: 2.39 MB
  • Authors: Roxane Gay

Description

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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Roxane Gay was raped when she was 12.In reading Roxane’s autobiography, I was reminded of another woman’s rape words about how she disassociated and felt herself floating above, watching her own rape from the ceiling and these are her words: “I will spend the rest of my life trying to reattach the parts of me that watched from the ceiling that day”.”Coming back” from rape is a journey, and it is usually punctuated with a lot of self-destruction, and Roxane’s story has a lot of that. She often runs towards self-destruction because maybe on the other side of that, there is some kind of familiarity, some kind of safety, some version, perhaps twisted, of love. She writes of “needing to be a victim of some kind over and over. That was something familiar, something I understood” (p.236 of my paperback copy).After sexual assault, it seems less harmful for a girl to inflict damage upon herself rather than having others do it. Sexually abused women will almost always have issues revolving around control because they often feel some of their control was relinquished, stolen, or lost in the abuse. And since sexual abuse involves her body in such a direct way, it is natural that control will be often directed there, at her own body.In Roxane’s novel, An Untamed State, the main character is gang-raped, just like Roxane. Instead of binge-eating, however, she does NOT eat, saying she wants to feel “empty”, because if there is nothing there, if she is nothing, then, naturally, there’s NOTHING LEFT TO HURT.Both these approaches–overeating and undereating–are flip sides of the same control coin. And it is a message to her potential perpetrators, and it is this: “I’ve ruined myself before giving anyone else the chance to EVER AGAIN”.Before he organized his gang rape of Roxane, “Christopher” was someone Roxane wanted love from. She writes on p. 49: “Christopher wanted to use me. I wanted him to love me. I wanted him to fill the loneliness, to ease the ache of being awkward”. This is the TRAP girls fall into, desperately wanting love or validation from an incapable boy, and they are often PUSHED into this trap. They are pushed by the media, by fairy tales, and they are often unaware that these guys are playing games.After the rape, Roxane writes that she became “hyperconscious of how I take up space” (p. 172). This can be a result of sexual assault, regardless of body size. Many sexually assaulted women become hyper-vigilant and PTSD-ing in public because they know how quickly aggression can happen.Unexamined, sexual assault creates a low bar for future relationships. When Roxane gets older, she often does not wait to get to know someone before jumping into a relationship, which often happens when sexually abused young women start having relationships. She writes of a new relationship that she jumps into that “we did not yet know the worst things about each other” (p. 235).There should be a WAIT before you really know someone. And usually before a couple has sufficiently waited, they have bonded in “love” or more likely lust, and now feel close. BUT YET they don’t really know each other, and, most likely, just know the best versions of each other: the desirable sheen.There’s always something sacred to the sexually assaulted woman, but it usually isn’t sex. Roxane writes about the meaning of hugs for her: “A hug means something to me; it is an act of profound intimacy” (p.258).She also writes of her perceived “inability to overcome my past” (p. 260). For me, seeing how rape is related to blurrier sexually coercive situations, including medical coercion, actually helps, because then rape becomes not an isolated incident, but weaved into the sorry-state of today’s sneak-driven society.Sexual assault is hard to crawl back from and there are some harsh reviewers here, their dismissive attitudes can come abusively close to the perpetrator’s energy. Treat Roxane, and all the “Roxanes” with thinner bodies, kindly, respectfully, because that’s only the beginning of the way back from abuse for all of society. Because, until that day, and I am not optimistic that that day will come, I will feel as Roxane feels: “angry when I think about how my sexuality has been shaped” (p. 246) AND…….”weary of all our sad stories–not hearing them, but that we have these stories to tell, and that there are so many” (p.247).

⭐Ms. Gay has bared her heart and soul in this very honest tome about her journey. I am one of those naturally thin, white girls she talks about. Her book has given me a deep andsympathetic understanding of those who struggle with their weight and why some find such comfort in food.

⭐Roxane is a wonderful writer! This is the first book of hers that I have read. This book is for all sizes. Trainers need to read this!I’m a “fit” adult but was the biggest girl in school until 8th grade. I felt this.

⭐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 frustrating thing about cages is that you’re trapped but you can see exactly what you want’. RG was raped when she was 12, and then she ate and ate until her body became a fortress. But then she admits that when she was young she knew nothing about anything. She kept her secret and misunderstood her body. She was led to that belief by the world that worships thinness. Then after she wrote her book ‘Bad Feminism’ there was a photo-shoot for the book promotion. Staring at her full-length body shot she realized that that was her. That was what she looked like. That was the beginning of her coming to peace with herself and the world. This book is not a sop story. It is not a story that ‘demands to be told and deserves to be read’. It will be impossible not to like RG when one has read the last line of the book and feel with her, sharing her jubilation, enjoying her freedom. It is a book that everyone who is in a cage should read – and who is not in a cage?

⭐I read this author’s novel “An Untamed State” recently and was hooked by her approach. Even though it was a novel there was clearly a huge amount of her personal experiences in the narrative. That led me to read this memoir to find out more about her.The book details her struggles with her body. After a terrifying experience as a teenager she ate as a form of protection which resulted in a lifelong battle with obesity. Her weight remains a powerful identifier.In the book RG is incredibly honest – I actually struggled to believe that someone was brave enough to say everything she does. Almost everyone struggles with weight at some point and to some degree or another, this means that there will be something in this book that will be familiar. Her reactions and weight issues are more extreme than most people’s but she writes in such a frank manner that there is no opportunity (or desire) to judge her choices.Admittedly this goes against some of the morals of the book but I loved the cover of the edition I read (end of a fork), although it took me a while to work it out!!I try very hard to be non judgmental and think I can often empathise with people who are different from me, however I found reading this book quite hard. RG made me analyse my attitude to people who are overweight. I came away from this book vowing to work harder on my approach to other people and will also try to influence how others see fat people. I genuinely had no idea how hard it is to do the most simple of tasks (sit on a chair in a restaurant, walk through a door and many others).This is a difficult read and is uncomfortable but it is meant to be – that reaction is the only way to acknowledge some understanding of the author.

⭐Before I read this book, I never knew that anyone else felt like I did about their body image. I have wasted my whole life on self destructive behavior towards myself. I’m 52 and I hope someone young reads this book before they take the same path as me.

⭐Quite simply this book is incredible. Perhaps without even meaning to it has put into words lot of how I feel. My trauma may be very different but many of the comments Roxane makes about herself I could have said about myself. The power of this is that I often reacted with shock or sadness wanting to support Roxane and tell her it wasn’t her fault, that she is enough, before she then gives the same responses I give. Maybe just maybe if I can so confidently be on Roxane ‘s side to believe she is enough perhaps this means I might be too.IIf anyone wants to understand how I feel this is the book to read

⭐A brilliantly raw book. I reread parts of this book because it reflected my own experience of abuse and the subsequent, life-long battle with food. To be a woman in this world is to battle stereotypes, and male beliefs about women’s bodies and how they ‘should’ be. Roxane expresses the deeper struggles of both body weight issues and woman’s need to free herself from the prison of societal beliefs. Every woman should read this. Most will recognise their own struggle. I certainly did.

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