And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. This is what most girls are taught - that we should be slender and small. Even at that young age, I understood that to be fat was to be undesirable to men, to be beneath my contempt, and I already knew too much about their contempt. I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure another such violation, and so I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away. Some boys destroyed me, and I barely survived it. You will remember the times you fat-shamed someone, or were fat-shamed yourself. This is where Gay’s life trajectory was split in two, so brutal that you want to look away. This is her refrain underneath it is the core wound of the rape. How, soon after the rape, she began eating as a way to make her body into a fortress, so that what happened would never happen again. Organized in short bursts of chapters, the narrative takes on a circular pattern, with Gay returning to certain phrases, concepts, events. I don’t have any powerful insight into what it takes to overcome an unruly body and unruly appetites.
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This is not a book that will offer motivation. There will be no picture of a thin version of me, my slender body emblazoned across this book’s cover, with me standing in one leg of my former, fatter self’s jeans. The story of my body is not a story of triumph. Gay tells the reader from the onset that we won't find catharsis in the story she’s about to tell. We want to read about discipline, about celebrities that lose the baby weight, about slimming down disguised as catharsis. (HarperCollins)Īmericans crave stories of triumph, especially over the body: the defeat of addiction, disease, and above all, obesity.
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All of which makes anticipation high for the June 23 publication of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (HarperCollins $25.99), wherein Gay spends 305 pages explicating those lingering repercussions from that day in the woods. Earlier this year, she released a short story collection, Difficult Women, which arrived to excellent reviews. The essay was followed by more and more writing, and Gay's ascendance to the bestseller list with her immensely popular essay collection Bad Feminist. “They kept me there for hours," Gay wrote. Is that man going to say something to me? When am I going to be told to smile when I don’t want to? When is someone going to yell something vulgar or crude to me from a passing car? They can also take monstrous, unbearable shape: for Gay, a horrific rape by a group of popular boys that she knew from school.
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They can be as routine as walking down a familiar street, always assessing for threats. Talk to most women and they'll have dozens of stories of aggressions - both micro and macro - from every stage of life.
#ROXANE GAY HUNGER DIFFICULT WOMEN SERIES#
Those on Twitter who followed Gay - already famous, at least in the indie literary world, for her straightforward, insightful writing about Sweet Valley High, toxic American racism and more - had known that she was a huge fan of the film and book series (and a die-hard member of Team Peeta).īut within a few paragraphs, it became clear that the essay wasn’t your average chronicle of an obsessive love for a film. Rather, Gay used The Hunger Games as an entry point to write about being raped in an abandoned hunting cabin in the woods when she was 12 years old, and the end of her illusions of safety and strength. In 2012, Roxane Gay, the founding essays editor at The Rumpus, published an essay ostensibly about about The Hunger Games.