This tension is echoed by her storytelling. The contradiction of Gay's experience weaves through her narrative: She built a new body to protect herself and regain some semblance of control, but in doing so she lost even more of who she was. Gay falls into a pattern of instructing the reader on what she wants them to take away from the book instead of simply telling her story.Īs the book progresses these moments fall away, and once Gay finds her voice, the result is extraordinary. In the beginning of the book, Gay calls Hunger the 'most difficult writing experience of life.' Unfortunately, at times her struggle to understand her experience is all too apparent. At her heaviest, Roxane Gay weighed 577 lbs.
Informed by cultural norms, Gay understood that obese women were unattractive, so she ate in excess to ensure she would never again be brutalized. The rape, Gay recounts, left a void inside her, and she used food to fill that void. In the 'after' the reader watches Gay collapse into a traumatized shell of her former self. Throughout the book, Gay refers to her life in two parts: 'before' and 'after.' In the 'before,' Gay is a normal, if awkward, preteen girl from a loving family. For Gay, this journey began at age 12 when she was raped by a classmate and a group of his friends.
