Reviews with content warning for Bullying - Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

Sometimes the bravest act one can do is to speak one's truth and this is Roxane Gay's naked truth: the story of her body and the space it takes up in the world. At 12, she was raped and her body violated repeatedly, so she took to eating to stop herself from appearing as attractive to the opposite gender. She ate and ate and made herself bigger to feel safe and gain control of a body that was no longer hers.

'Hunger' is an exploration of the shame and the prejudice fat people and fat bodies are subjected to. It delves into the marketing, the media, and the culture built around the messaging that any body other than a thin, well-proportioned, small body is undesirable, repulsive and outright violation of the norms of beauty and aesthetics.

Gay walks us through the stages of her interpersonal relations and her career. The failed relationships, the abuse she suffered and the way she made herself smaller, denigrated herself to receive the love that was kindly offered by her partners. She took what she could with a kind of self-sacrificial diligence. Her gender was erased, and her entire existence shrunk to the size of her body and the space it occupies.

She exposes the bitter truth of reality TV on weight loss transformations, the harmful behaviour it promotes and how even celebs like Ophrah openly struggle with her body image and how she advocates that within every big woman's body lies a thinner, prettier woman- a whole woman. As if fatness is a condition to be fixed & be remedied. And what about the psychological trauma, the years of self-sabotaging behaviours, eating disorders, and the mental and emotional wreckage of that one incident? Will those disappear magically too if she were to be 'cured' of her excess weight? How do you unlearn those harmful patterns of behaviour, those boundaries and cages you've built carefully to keep you safe?

Well, you can start by forgiving yourself and showing kindness to yourself and 'Hunger' is Roxane's act of forgiving herself and being kind to her body.

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kshertz's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense

3.5

It’s a really hard book for me as I know it’s not really a book meant for me. It is an important read for me to understand and combat my own fat phobia. I also have to combat books that are a about someone processing their life and still being in the middle of processing it without any kind of aha moment or this kind of memoir that is so brutally honest and vulnerable and in the gray area. I almost feel like I’m not mature enough or far enough in my journey to totally get this memoir and I felt this way when I read it a few years ago. I hope to keep reading it every few years to see if this changes for me. I’m the meantime, she’s an incredibly talented author and human on another playing field with her writing and I appreciate how she challenges me.

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mandi4886's review against another edition

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emotional reflective fast-paced

4.25

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aiyam's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

5.0

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sleeson's review against another edition

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dark informative tense slow-paced

1.25

This was a very confusing never-ending contraction of feelings and emotions. It feels like no matter what you do, it will be other’s fault and mistakes not the author’s.

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