A review by lesbegays
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

challenging emotional hopeful informative reflective sad fast-paced

4.5

as someone who is fat, has been fat my whole life (except for a few years of flirting with starvation in high school), and will almost certainly be fat for the rest of my life, this was painful to read. i am what roxane gay calls “lane bryant fat.” i can shop in stores with plus size sections, sometimes even in straight sizes if i’m lucky and the XL is sized very generously. i am more than a foot shorter than gay and don’t stand out, don’t take up as much space. i don’t know what it’s like to struggle to find any clothes at all, to worry about breaking or not fitting into furniture. but i do avoid going to the doctor because i know they’ll just tell me to lose weight, no matter the problem. i did have my eating disorder ignored by psychiatric professionals because i had starved my body from an unacceptable size down to an acceptable one. i have been teased and ignored and shamed. being reminded of those experiences hurts. the most painful part of this, though, was to hear the ways in which gay struggles so much with her body. loving my body has become an act of necessity and survival, and it hurts to see someone so successful and so much older than me still struggle. 
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