Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

Written by Roxane Gay

Narrated by Roxane Gay

'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.'

New York Times best-selling 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 20s - including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life - and brings listeners into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life.

With the bracing candour, 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Little, Brown (Hachette UK) Audio
• Release date: Jul 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781405538930

Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay is the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist; the novel An Untamed State, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize; the New York Times bestselling memoir Hunger; and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, for which she also writes the “Work Friend” column, she has written for Time, McSweeney’s, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, and Oxford American, among many other publications. Her work has also been selected for numerous Best anthologies, including Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018 and Best American Mystery Stories 2014. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. In 2018 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and holds the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University’s Institute for Women’s Leadership.

Reviews for Hunger

[mojomomma_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I heard Gay speak at a conference some time ago, and I was expecting something sort of funny and snarky. This was instead frightening and aching, yet thoughtful. Gay was raped as a girl and the pain of that experience caused her to eat. She became estranged from her family and had several hard years an a young adult before she found her voice as a writer. She still struggles with the aftermath of what happened to her as a 12-year-old.

[zoes_human · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Roxane Gay's capacity for self-reflection, intellectual honestly, and authentic engagement is inspiring and impressive. Her life experience is quite different from mine (excepting strangely the path we both took with smoking), yet I feel a deep connection to it through this work. This will emotionally challenge you, but also has the capacity to make you a better human and to feel seen in all your complexity.

[jscape2000 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Riveting and challenging. She makes me wish the world were a less awful place.

[thewestwing-864351 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I found this to be an incredibly powerful read and know that I will be thinking about this book in the weeks and months ahead. I could identify myself in many parts of this book and felt that Gay was able to articulate my life experiences as a fat woman in a way I would never be able to do.

[dairyqueen84 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fat shaming is one of the last acceptable prejudices in our society. Roxane Gay in a devastatingly painful memoir shames society for our attitudes toward fat people and offers reasons why things aren't always as simple as they seem. It got a bit repetitive because it was culled from essays she has written over the years. Gut-wrenching and a must-read for everyone.

[dele2451 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Full of hard truths and raw pain. Chapter 84 is one of my favorites--make the dude sweat for the rest of his miserable life.

[bodagirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Incredibly difficult to listen to, and at some points Gay's insecurities about her body hit too close to home. It was beautifully and bluntly written.

[arosoff-513117 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is both an intensely personal and painful memoir, and a sharp criticism of what it means to be a fat woman in America: the pain of being a woman who takes up space. As always, Gay's writing is on point--sharp and distinctive, and mordantly funny.

A must read.

[ssperson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Holy crap, this book is a kick in the gut. I suspected it would be, which is why it took me so long to work up the nerve to read it. Man. So good. Rips your heart out and doesn't do a great job of stuffing it back into your chest. I don't know how Dr. Gay managed to write this book. At the end, she says it's the most difficult thing she's ever written, and I totally believe that.

[wagner5sarah35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

With deep insight, Roxane Gay shows what it is like to be fat and to be a fat woman. The compounding trauma, the little things that become difficult and then insurmountable, the self-loathing, the invisibility, the taking up of space, the lack of clothing, and so, so much more in this book are just too familiar. I may not weigh as much as the author, but I am not thin and I live in the same world. So much in this book hits close to home and I'd encourage everyone to read it because it really makes you think about how we treat obesity in our culture, how its spoken of, and the trauma which underlies it.

[tonifgmamtc · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book really spoke to me. It's a great book for the overweight and the slim. It tells a lot from a POV of how hard some situations are when you're bigger, not just the emotional aspect but actually, some things like chair arms can be hell. She lays so many things out there that most of us tend to stay quiet about. It's powerful speaking the truth.

[brakketh-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Deeply personal and striking telling of Gay's relationship with her body and moving her body through the world.

[suesbooks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I thought the content was very important, but I did not care for the style of writing. There was so much repetition that it was tedious. I also did not care for her knowing the motives of everyone she met.

[drfuriosa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Roxane Gay is unspeakably vulnerable in this memoir about her body, and it is humbling to read. It is crushing and empowering at once. I have learned much about wholehearted empathy divorced from pity. I highly recommend this book.

[theampersand · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"Hunger" is a tough read, a brave testionial, and an effective record of self-construction, but I'm not sure that it's a good book. I didn't enjoy it and wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but I'm still glad that it exists. Over the course of eighty-eight rapid-fire chapters, Roxane Gay tells us what it was like to grow up as an upper-middle class Haitian-American in the Midwest, what it was like to have her life shattered by a truly appalling crime at twelve, and how it led her, more-or-less directly, to develop an all-consuming hunger -- for food, for intimacy, for safety -- that came close to destroying her more than once. Gay is astonishingly honest about her often humiliating adolescence, the numerous bad decisions she made throughout her twenties, and her current state of mind, which is haunted -- and occasionally defined -- by fear, self-loathing, and anger. This isn't a book for the faint of heart. Life hasn't been particularly easy on the author, in some ways, and she doesn't feel much need to sugarcoat things for her readers. And that's just one of the remarkable choices that Gay makes here. For a book written by a published author and creative writing professor, "Hunger" often seems almost defiantly unliterary. She repeats certain word and phrases over and over again, as if trying to drill the reality of her experience into her reader. She's not afraid to use recognizably political language often heard in activist circles. This may turn some readers off, but, then again, so what? Gay isn't trying to write the next "Speak, Memory" here: "Hunger" is a forthrightly political work. The author doesn't skip any of the gory details when she describes what it's like to live in a body that, at one point, weighed well in excess of four-hundred pounds. She wants us to know how much being black, being Haitian, being big, and being a victim of a crime has defined her. In a certain way, Gay makes it work: the book's conscious linguistic repetition and its willingness to discuss the less pleasant parts of moving through the world when you weigh as much as two Hollywood actresses can make feel the very physicality of the author's troubled and troublesome body. "Hunger" works pretty much the same way thematically: Gay sometimes seem to be striving to convince her reader that her experience that the trauma she suffered is permanent and tangible as any other object, or as irrefutably present as she is herself. She admits that getting over it isn't going to be possible, that fighting through her pain and mental issues is really the only realistic option available to her. Over the course of this memoir, Gay asks speculates more than once what her life might have been like if she hadn't undergone such a traumatic experience at a young age. It's a tempting thought, and it's likely one that more than will resonate with more than a few readers. But Gay always circles back to how she looks, how much she weighs, and what she has made of her life. "Hunger" may not be a great book, or even a good memoir. But I can't think of a better account of an author forcing herself, at considerable personal emotional risk, to accept some hard truths about herself. This one is a body blow of a book, but Gay seems to accept that many black women and people in uncooperative bodies have gone through worse. For many, this book may say much more about healing than it does about Gay's own experiences. If you think you might be one of those people, don't hesitate to pick it up.

[lyndainoregon · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Roxane Gay's memoir "Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body" is brutal. Heartbreaking. Honest. Revelatory.Her journey will not be the reader’s journey; her story will not be the reader’s story. But for every woman whose reality does not conform to the impossible ideal seen on the glossy pages of fashion magazines, there will be a chapter … a paragraph … a sentence … a phrase ... that hits home; that makes the reader say: Yes. That’s how it is.Brutally assaulted at the age of 12, by a gang of boys that included her then-boyfriend, Gay withdrew in fear and shame, told no one, and began to protect herself in the only way she knew how – by building a wall out of her own body, by creating a physicality that would protect her against further sexual assault by making her “invisible” to men. She ate to fill the emptiness within her. She ate for the sensual pleasure it gave. She ate when she was bored. When she was nervous. When she was sad. When she was angry. The result, not surprisingly, was massive weight gain. That, combined with an adolescent growth spurt that topped out at 6’3”, and her indulgence in tattoos, produced a formidable physical presence, backing up a radical feminist outrage over "the toxic cultural norms that dictate far too much of how women live their lives and treat their bodies."But "Hunger" is not an “accept me as I am because all bodies are beautiful” tale. Nor is it a “how I lost 400 pounds and found love” story. It’s a painfully honest look at how one lives each day in a prison of flesh, knowing all the while that it is a self-built prison – or perhaps a citadel.Readers may not agree with many of Gay’s choices. They may be particularly appalled at her continuing obsession with the boy – now man – who led the devastating assault on her 12-year-old self. Gay is a work in progress – a human being who was, in her words “broken”, and had to get more broken in order to heal.

[thomaspluck · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very brave memoir. Hits home a lot for me. At one point I was near 400 lbs. I struggle with my weight and took to weightlifting and fight training to both fill in the sag and ensure I'd never endure another insult without consequence. It's not healthy, waiting for the joke, knowing only the threat of physical violence keeps people from saying them aloud. But what I endure is nothing compared to what women like Roxane deal with every day. It's the last taboo. Everyone feels not only entitled to mock fat people but a moral imperative, like they are helping somehow, like your "help" and cruelty isn't something we've had inflicted upon us for life.
It is none of your business. Any more than me telling you to get therapy or plastic surgery or anything else would be. You're not helping. They know they are possibly unhealthy, could be happier, whatever. You're not "telling them the truth they need to hear." You're telling them you can't overlook this to be their friend.
"I just want you to be happy."
That's not your responsibility.
They'll be happier to have friends who accept them.
And you'll be happier too.

[jekka-986711 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have so much to say about this book and about how close some of it hit, but I suspect many women who have struggled with disordered eating and cultural beauty norms could say the same. What a beautiful, vulnerable book. Men should read this book.

[barrettlucero · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beautiful and brutal and honest.

[nml_dc · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[beth.clarke · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[readingover50 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[cindywho-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Some memoir, some personal essay - Gay has a great voice that calms even through heartbreaking story.

[deeehmm · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[jane3phillips-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[sweetiegherkin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[neverstopreading-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

 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.

[librarianryan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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

[wellreadcatlady · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[over.the.edge · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hungar:A Memoir of (my) Body????By Roxane Gay2017Harper CollinsAt 12 years old, Gay was tricked into going to a cabin in the woods with a male she thought was her friend. There she was raped by him and he watched as his friends violated her also. With no self esteem left, she kept returning with the same results. She began eating as a way to make her body look undesirable. ..to put space, to get so big no one could get close to her again.p.19"My body is a cage. My body is a cage if my own making. I am still trying to figure my way out of it. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than twenty years."This book is about hungar- the hungar to change. To be accepted, treated as equal. To be respected and seen as a person. The hungar to stop hungaring. The hungar to stop feeding the hungar.p.173-174"And so I am terrified of people. I hear the rude comments whispered.....This is the world we live in. Looks matter, and we can say "But but but"....But no. Looks matter. Bodies matter."I loved this memoir about feeling comfortable with who you are and how you see yourself. At times this was difficult to read. In the last chapter Gay begins this process of self realization that all victims go through. She begins to feel free in her own body and life. She begins to feel alive.p.251"These sad stories will always weigh on me, though that burden lessens the more I realize who I am and what I am worth." Highly recommended.....esp in these times.