This is not a revenge memoir, but I can’t help but wonder if her perpetrator is haunted by his actions. (They say that revenge is a poor reason to write a memoir. Speaking so clearly and bravely of her abuser is a declaration of being, and a taking back of her own life.
The chapter is an exploration into the life of the boy (now an adult man) who orchestrated and helped commit the crime against her. It’s a memoir of reflection.Ĭhapter eighty-four in particular must have been cathartic to write. Hunger is a meditation on what Gay did to herself and why. Gay the sociologist uses her own experience to examine the human condition. There is the hunger for adequate public accommodations, the hunger to be closer to her family, the hunger for thinness. There is the hunger for love and affection, for acceptance, for touch, to be seen and heard, for validation and respect, for sustenance, for sex, for equality, kindness, pain, and punishment. First, there is the ravenous hunger of a young woman attempting to protect herself-through food-from the gaze and violence of men. The theme of hunger is explored in its many ways.
This is also what makes memoir the literary genre of our time. These revelations are made possible because of the narrator’s willingness to share her deepest and darkest secrets and her ability to then, with ruthless honestly, reflect upon those secrets. One’s personal challenge does not need to be as extreme as the narrator’s to glimpse a personal truth, or the place where the reader’s particular dysfunction might reside on the spectrum. The revelation of her own suffering provides a window into which the individual reader might find parts of themself. In her ruthlessly honest telling, Gay reveals a spectrum of human dysfunction as it relates to obesity. She explores the cycle of shame that leads her further down the road of disordered eating, self-destructive romantic entanglements, and family estrangements. She speaks of the toll her fatness takes on her personal health, relationships, and the public disgust and disregard she must endure because of her condition. Gay declares that the bigger you are the less you are seen. Gay turns her body into a fortress for her own self-protection. She begins to feel herself to be nothing because she has been treated as nothing: “Those boys treated me like nothing, so I became nothing” (45). She sees her body as a crime scene, herself as both the perpetrator and the victim. She is not fine with her body: “I am not comfortable in my body” (18). I’ll tell you, just give me a minute.” Once she does tell her truth, Gay goes on to examine her own actions and their consequences: It’s as if Gay wants to say: “Okay, okay, I’m almost ready.
At first there is a reticence in telling the story of the rape. In simple clear prose, Gay declares what happened to her twelve-year-old self-a vicious gang rape that left her wounded, altering the trajectory of her life. Her examples range from descriptions of public and private erasure, the dearth of public accommodation, and so much more. Roxane Gay’s Hunger is a powerful memoir that depicts a very personal narrative while also serving as a work of criticism, exploring society’s inability to see or accommodate the needs of the extremely obese.