She went to boarding school and was accepted to an ivy league college. Her family was and is made up of loving, kind, successful, and intelligent people. Gay didn’t tell her parents what happened, living with her sexual assault alone for reasons she can’t explain.
No boy wants to have sex with a fat girl, she reasons, but she’ll be tougher if she eats more, too. After, she eats to make her body both stronger and objectionable. When she was 12 and thin, she was gang-raped in a cabin in the woods. Roxane Gay is the daughter of Haitian immigrants. Even Roxane Gay writes that she does not want her fat body to be their inspiration. They’ll feel like they understand fat bodies after reading this memoir and feel sad at the lives fat people live. I argue those will all be thin people who say that. People are going to read this book and call it raw, honest, inspirational, brave. Hunger a long-awaited memoir whose original publication date was pushed back quite a bit (a year, I believe). Many of the chapters start with the same idea, which creates a poetic rhythm to the memoir. It’s effective at showing the difficulty of this book’s contents. Each chapter is written like flash fiction (about 1-4 pages), but it also feels like she gets writing, is ashamed of her story, and then starts again. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay was published on June 13th by Harper Collins.
