People at the gym offer well-intentioned words of encouragement. Air cabin crew wonder aloud if their safety belt extensions will encircle her girth. Gay describes strangers lifting fattening items out of her shopping trolley. Not that she wants our rescuing pity – on the contrary, one of the complications of her life is the resentment she feels about other people’s reactions. One longs to be able to go back in time, to intervene, to find help for her. Terrible to think of a 12-year-old child willing herself to go on as though nothing had happened.
She felt guilty for once fancying the boy who raped her. Raised as a Catholic, the daughter of Haitian immigrant parents – her father a civil engineer – she feared their reaction. Gay did not tell her parents what had happened until she had grown up. Those boys treated me like nothing so I became nothing.” “Hating myself became as natural as breathing. Her mutinous body is the continuing subtext – going its own way, persisting in its compulsions, fleshing out the story. There is a tension between her low self-esteem and the self-worth needed to write this courageous, honest book. A New York Times and Guardian US columnist, her punchy authority is in contrast to what she describes. But most important, in the context of this book, writing is weightlessness. Writing can be escapist and can be an opiate (it has been both for Gay, although neither here). Reading the book is to witness the gap between the conscious mind and the unconscious body – in combat for years. As a writer, she can rise above her body and the humiliations of the flesh. Throughout the book, two selves exist in tandem: Gay as writer and as a woman living her life. Fatness was home in a game of chase: “a place where no one can get you”. The fatter her body became, the safer she felt. She makes it persuasively plain that fatness began as a response to rape. And although Gay regrets she is unable to go as far as the campaigners who rejoice in their size, she does want us to rethink what fatness can mean.įor Gay, overeating was, for a while, her solution. The book is an attempt to see fat in its complexity, its contrariness – as potentially more than a physical problem to be overcome. Yet this is no attention-seeking misery memoir.
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“They were boys who were not yet men but knew, already, how to do the damage of men.” One reads about the unthinkable abuse she suffered – the boy holding her wrists and spitting in her face after raping her is a particularly upsetting detail – and feels as shaken as if one were directly witnessing what she describes. She drags her account on to the page – faltering, incomplete, unsensational. They were in an abandoned hunting cabin in the woods in Omaha, Nebraska, where no one but the boys could hear her screams. “That something terrible broke me.” Aged 12, she was gang-raped by “a boy I thought I loved, and a group of his friends”. “Something terrible happened,” she writes.
Terrible to think of a 12-year-old child willing herself to go on as though nothing had happened A personal story, with implications for us all. We should not take up space.” But her book is a bid to take up space in another sense, to tell a story that wants to shrink into invisibility yet needs to be told. She remarks with devastating simplicity: “This is what most girls are taught – that we should be slender and small. To some extent, she is on the side of Susie Orbach. She does not duck from telling us, early on, that at 6ft 3in tall, she weighed, at her heaviest, 577 pounds: “That is a staggering number, one I hardly believe, but at one point, that was the truth of my body.” She does – and does not – know, she says, how things got so out of hand. Hunger tells a story that must have been as hard to write as it is disturbing to read. Gay’s last book, Bad Feminist, became a New York Times bestseller and revealed her to be a writer unfazed by inconvenient truths and a champion of women – especially gay and black women. F at is more than a feminist issue – as this extraordinary memoir by novelist and essayist Roxane Gay reveals.