This novel really helped me to understand Gay’s struggles in ways I never would have imagined. I also found Hunger to be a very well written and powerful memoir. I look forward to hearing from the both of you soon,
Life is full of hardships most things will inevitably get worse before they gets better, until you reach a place in your life to balance out the bad and the semi-good things that come across your life. I find myself admiring her cutthroat approach of warning the reader that not every book will have happy endings. There will be no picture of a thin version of me, my slender body emblazoned across this book’s cover…Mine is not a success story. I liked how straight-forward and honest she was about the content of her memoir, stating that “This is not a weight-loss memoir. You feel like nothing, so you treat yourself like you are nothing because that’s what you feel what you deserve. I don’t know about you guys, but while I’ve never struggled with my weight, I know first hand about what trauma can do and how it can decimate a person until they are nothing.
I felt a strong sense of understanding with this topic. So, she turned to food as a comfort, gaining more and more weight because “ I felt undesirable, then I could keep more hurt away” (Gay 15).
In the beginning, she opens up with the struggle of dealing with her “wildly undisciplined” body and how she claims she is “trapped in in a cage” (Gay 17) because of the rape she suffered when she was twelve years old. Written by Roxane Gay, the author of Difficult Women, Hunger is a personal and harrowing tale that details her struggle with weight and how it has impacted her childhood, teens, and twenties. Through these essays, Gay and this all-star group of writers prove the point that rape culture is deeply embedded in the way we live, work, date and raise our kids - and it’s not just bad, it’s downright horrifying.Hunger is probably one of the most heart-wrenching and powerful memoirs I have ever read. That drumbeat has gotten louder, especially since Harvey Weinstein story broke in October and the #MeToo movement has grown too large to ignore. Kelly to our own goddamn president - keep me in a constant state of postrape PTSD.” And she also writes that there’s no tidy end to processing that: “The constant drumbeat of stories of sexual assault - from R. Samhita Mukhopadhyay, executive editor of Teen Vogue, writes about when she started to recognize herself as a survivor, and the shock that came with it - that even as someone who edited a best-selling collection of feminist essays, she had difficulty recognizing the violence inflicted on her. Most striking for me were the essays that recognized an incident as rape long after it occurred - a doctor asking about shredded cervix years providing evidence of that sex with a former partner wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was assault, or waking up after a drunken night to being penetrated and equating it to “bad sex.” And the contributions are just as diverse - from gut-wrenching stories of assault to sharp analysis of all the ways our culture chooses to ignore the actions of perpetrators in favour of victim-blaming. Her latest project includes a refreshingly diverse range of writers, including Canadian writer Stacey May Fowles, actors Ally Sheedy and Gabrielle Union, and them’s executive editor Meredith Talusan. And Gay is the perfect person to help us start.Īn American writer, editor and professor at Purdue University, Gay is the author of best-selling non-fiction and fiction books, including Bad Feminist and most recently, Hunger.
This logic is inflicted on survivors in many ways, and Gay writes it was a way for her to cope, but that ultimately diminishing her experience “hurt far more than it helped.” Now - post-Weinstein, post-#MeToo - we’ve entered a new era of understanding of how bad it really is, opening a new space for conversations on how to move forward. Not That Bad is the title of the anthology, and it’s also what Gay told herself after she was gang-raped at 12 - that surely, there were others who had it worse. “I taught myself to be grateful I survived even if survival did not look like much,” Roxane Gay writes in the preface to the new book of essays on rape culture she’s edited.