We hear a little about her family and some of her past partners, but it’s mostly about her and her challenges. I appreciated her honesty because I can’t imagine it’s easy to bare so much of your past pain to the world and to let them judge you. Gay’s struggles to recognize love were relatable to me. I had a high school boyfriend whose ideas of ‘love’ were spending as much time together as possible and not talking to other males. Where he got this idea (movies, his parents, friends, etc.) I’m not sure but it began to influence my understanding of love as well. You learn to see love through the eyes of someone you think you love. For a while after that, even into dating my now-husband, I thought this was love.
Two anthropomorphic avocado halves are in a fight.When we weren’t together, I felt alone, abandoned, and unloved.
One of them is crying and the other is chasing after it, apologetically pleading via speech bubble "I said you're the good kind of fat!" Because the fat in avocados is monounsaturated. Because the fat in human bodies is a stigma, or a punchline, or an asset, depending on whether it pleases or repulses the eye of the beholder. The cartoon itself is not malicious, but the meaning is all too real: If your body is "the bad kind," others will tell you, even if – like that meddling avocado, its confused little grimace the proverbial facial gesture of condescending ungraciousness – they haven't been asked. In Roxane Gay's new memoir, Hunger, these intrusions happen every day, verbally or otherwise. Gay tells the story of giving a reading at the Housing Works bookstore in New York. Gay and the other authors were expected to climb up, despite the sheer inaccessibility of the expectation. "I was filled with self-loathing of an intense degree for the next several days," she writes. "Sometimes I have a flashback to the humiliation of that evening and I shudder." She writes of going to the doctor only if she really has to in order to spare herself the shaming of the indignities involved in air travel of the unsolicited evaluations from strangers. To read these experiences consolidated in one place, written so clear-heartedly, is to understand the exhaustion of living in a body under surveillance.
"Mine is not a success story," Gay writes early on, squashing any preconceived assumptions that this memoir is about weight loss, as so many body stories are. A bestselling author and contributing writer at The New York Times, Gay calls the process of finishing Hunger the most difficult writing endeavour of her life: "I was certain the words would come easily, the way they usually do. And what could be easier to write about than the body I have lived in for more than forty years? But I soon realized I was not only writing a memoir of my body I was forcing myself to look at what my body has endured, the weight I gained, and how hard it has been to both live with and lose that weight. I've been forced to look at my guiltiest secrets. Gay makes it clear that this memoir is not about the experience of being moderately heavy. "This is a book about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight," she says. Too often, body-acceptance discourse is driven by celebrities who aren't actually overweight. (Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer and Khloe Kardashian have all cashed in on chubby-girl personas, despite not being plus-size.) Gay may not consider her story a "success," but claiming the space in which to write fiercely about her body, when so few narratives in pop culture's body-acceptance arena are genuine – earned – is powerful. There are truths in this book many will be hearing for the first time.