I didn't realize that there was a vocabulary to describe the experience, and that it wasn't my fault. I was stunned and I just assumed, "OK, we just had sex." And I didn't realize that there was a thing called rape. I had very little comprehension of what happened to me. On being the victim of a gang rape at age 12 That's why I dragged my heels for so long - the book was actually delayed a year because of that, because I just procrastinated and procrastinated because I was just dreading writing the book, while still feeling like this was a necessary book to write. When I was writing it I was worried about exposing myself like this, and being this honest. The book is a confession, she says, and "having that kind of vulnerability in the hands of strangers really scared me." And she explains why she identified as a lesbian even though she was still attracted to men. The memoir is also about living with contradictions: She describes growing up a daughter of middle-class Haitian immigrants, and not fitting into the narrative of blackness. "And I just thought, 'Well, boys don't like fat girls, so if I'm fat, they won't want me and they won't hurt me again.' But more than that, I really wanted to just be bigger so that I could fight harder." "I grew up in this world where fat phobia is pervasive," she says. Gay traces her complicated relationship with her weight back to being a victim of sexual assault as a child. Hunger, she writes, is not about wanting to shed 30 or 40 pounds: "This is a book about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight," she explains. The result is Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.
The author of Bad Feminist and Difficult Women says the moment she realized that she would "never want to write about fatness" was the same moment she knew this was the book she needed to write. Roxane Gay has finally written the book that she "wanted to write the least." She teaches English at Purdue University. Her previous books include Bad Feminist, Difficult Women and An Untamed State. It shines a spotlight on the impact of trauma on mind and body and Gay’s struggles as she processes the rape and inhabits a body type that is so disliked by society.Roxane Gay is a novelist and short story writer. But Roxane Gay’s memoir provides a stark account of the aftermath of a sexual assault. This honesty isn’t often encountered outside of the therapy room. She writes, “Does he know that for years I could not stop what he started? I wonder what he would think if he knew that unless I thought of him I felt nothing at all while having sex.” She also details the devastating unwanted impact the assault had on her sex life, and her sense of self as a sexual person. Searching coffee shops near where he works, looking at his photo on his company website and occasionally calling his office. She thinks obsessively about the perpetrator. The aftermath of rape and sexual assaultīut there is another reason why Roxanne Gay’s book is outstanding, and it’s because she dares to tell the whole, confusing truth about being a sexual assault survivor. Men shouting out insults from cars, people’s faces dropping with disappointment when they realise she’s the author they’re expecting, and being treated with disdain whenever she boards an aeroplane. And the casual cruelty, she contends with every day. However Hunger by Roxane Gay is different because it provides a first person account of the reality of living in an overweight body. In her book she explored the relationship between feelings, food and women’s relationships with their bodies. Back in 1978, psychotherapist Susie Orbach wrote Fat is a Feminist Issue. Just the brutal truth.Īs a therapist I’m familiar with the idea that food, like many substances, can be used to dampen down traumatic feelings. There’s no padding, no qualifying and no extraneous words. Perhaps reflecting the content of the book. But the writing of Gay’s own memoir is controlled, stark and bold. Roxanne Gay teaches creative writing at Yale University. And perhaps unconsciously or consciously she, “Ate and ate and ate to build my body into a fortress.” Gay told no one about the attack and instead took solace in food as a way to repress her feelings. And as an adult she can trace her relationship with food back to the trauma of the brutal assault. There is a link between those two things.
And she was also gang raped at 12 years old. The first thing that strikes me about Roxane Gay’s memoir, Hunger, is how real and raw it is.