You also examine some of the assumptions that are made about overweight women – why they are overweight, why they don’t lose the weight, that they want to be “fixed.” You have to be as understanding of yourself as you are to other people and their humanity… so if anything, I’ve learned that I need to be kinder to myself. I don’t know that I’ve learned anything, I just know that navigating these tensions is something that requires patience and time and generosity to one’s self. What did writing this book teach you about exploring these kinds of tensions? You know what you want, but also what you think you deserve, which is less. You want to be invisible, yet need to be seen. There’s a push and pull theme that comes up a lot in the book - you don’t know how your life and your eating got so out of control, and yet you do. And so far the response has been overwhelmingly positive. I felt relieved that it was out of my hands. I felt relieved, mostly because I held onto the book until the absolute last drop-dead moment before the publication date would have to be pushed again. Once it was off to the publisher, did you feel relieved or terrified? I didn’t want to give more ammunition to my critics.
I did think, about six months in, maybe I should walk away… exposure is scary. I wanted to take a hard look at myself and my body. Did you ever have to fight the instinct to walk away from it, to protect yourself? You must have thought at some point, “I’m just not going to put myself through this.” This is, hands down, the most vulnerable piece of writing I’ve ever read. Writing Hunger was an attempt to “undestroy” herself, she writes - to undo the damage of carrying her secret, and allow herself, at 42, to be seen and understood. She talked to Chatelaine about how the world views fat people, the complexities of body positivity and what it feels like to finally take control of her story. When it becomes overwhelming and you put it aside for a couple of nights, it feels like a betrayal - like telling someone who’s trusted you with their deepest secrets, their darkest thoughts, that it’s all too hard to hear, so maybe just put a pin in it? Gay holds nothing back - there’s no distance from her pain, no position of triumph from which to view it from afar. When she needs to sit with her hurt, you sit with her. This won’t be easy.”īut even that warning can’t prepare you for the story ahead. The author of Bad Feminist, An Untamed State and, most recently, Difficult Women, is no stranger to tough subjects, but she calls Hunger “the most difficult writing experience of my life… These are the ugliest, weakest, barest parts of me.” Gay offers that preamble in Chapter 2 as if to say to the reader, “Hey - buckle up. I did not want anything, or anyone, to touch me.” She chronicles the slow but steady uptick in her weight through her teens, twenties and thirties, to the deep disappointment of her parents, who knew nothing of her secret.
“If I was undesirable, I could keep more hurt away… I needed to feel like a fortress, impenetrable. “I understood, from the way I saw people stare at fat people, from the way I stared at fat people, that too much weight was undesirable,” she writes. As she kept the rape a secret, food became her saviour. “Every body has a history” she writes in the first chapter, which, comprising a scant 21 words, gets directly to the point. “Here, I offer mine.” What follows is a searing examination of the forces that have shaped her body - which, after being gang raped by her boyfriend and several of his friends at age 12, she fought desperately to protect. For me, Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, is one of those books. You aren’t the same person you were when you started reading it, and you won’t be again. Every now and then you read a book that changes you.