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Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
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Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.

“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.”

In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.

With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateJun 13, 2017
ISBN9780062362605
Author

Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay is the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist; the novel An Untamed State, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize; the New York Times bestselling memoir Hunger; and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, for which she also writes the “Work Friend” column, she has written for Time, McSweeney’s, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, and Oxford American, among many other publications. Her work has also been selected for numerous Best anthologies, including Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018 and Best American Mystery Stories 2014. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. In 2018 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and holds the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University’s Institute for Women’s Leadership.

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Reviews for Hunger

Rating: 4.096223368191721 out of 5 stars
4/5

1,377 ratings106 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
     This memoir is raw and honest. It continues to confirm for the that various addictions - drugs, alcohol, sex, eating disorders - are all the same tune sung in different keys.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In beautiful prose and startling honesty, Gay writes a memoir that touches upon her rape as a child and her ongoing issues with weight. Along the way, she also discusses familial and romantic relationships, her career as a writer, and cultural issues that she sees in the way the world views overweight people.This was a very compelling read, although rather sadly poignant at times. For the audiobook version, Gay reads it herself, given an extra emotional resonance to her words. Her discussion of her challenges of moving about the world with an overweight body really helps readers develop more empathy and consideration towards others and the hurdles they may face. I had already been interested in reading some of this author's other books, and now want to do so even more.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a very raw memoir that begins when the author was 12 years old and gang-raped which led her to over-eat and eventually become morbidly obese, her body becoming a boundary and her protection from the outside world. In the memoir, the author describes her experience as a large person in a culture where we constantly fat-shame everyone who is more than a size zero. For the reader, it was an interesting, thought-provoking read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Some memoir, some personal essay - Gay has a great voice that calms even through heartbreaking story.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book was great. So many passages that really resonated with me. Roxane's experiences were similar yet very different to mine. I think so many people can read her book and feel that there is someone out there who understands them.

    So many times I start a memoir that is recommended, only to find it is not as good as I hoped. This book is every bit as good as I hoped and even better than I expected.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow! This memoir is fascinating. Roxane Gay tells her story in a way that I feel like I know her. She somehow takes the tragedies in her life and tells how she felt at the time and how if affects her now. She is an amazing writer and an even more amazing person. I'm glad she had the courage to tell her story. She narrates the audiobook which makes it very personal.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I cannot assess this book objectively. Roxane Gay speaks what's in my heart and mind despite the differences in our biographies or particular trajectories from childhood trauma to adult living. Beyond the emotional resonance, we are the same age and found refuge in so many of the same things (theater! the 90s internet! love of being in love!) that it is so easy to feel as if I know her like a friend, if I were able to be a friend to myself.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Beautiful and brutal and honest.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Prepare to be sad. There are funny and triumphant moments here, of course, but this book is primarily about vulnerability, heartbreak, and how they can mark a body for life. Roxane Gay was violated, traumatized, isolated and misunderstood, but also significantly heartbroken at that moment of childhood-stepping-into-womanhood when we probably wound most easily. In response, she embarked on a campaign to become too big to hurt. Gay reminds the reader that her story is unique, not intended as a universal narrative or a balm for those with similar experiences. As someone who has tried in many ways to be the opposite of big for most of my life, I can only say that I, too, found my reflection in Roxane.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    What an intense journey; this left me gutted and without a lot to say even though my mind is churning.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fair warning I listened to this book to fill a reading challenge requirement. Overall I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed the author reading her own work. But if I am being honest, if I was reading this I would never have finished. I too am a big woman. I’m still a Lane Bryant size (which is a thing in the book), but still. I have felt some of the things she has felt. You would think I would have liked the book better but I didn’t. And it has nothing to do with her story, or her writing, or what happens in its pages. It was very real and life altering, and I get that, it’s just not my type of story.I did become more interested when she talked about living in what i consider my home town. She was a faculty member at my alma mater, and working there around the time I has also just moved back home from Denver. Her descriptions of the places were so vivid, I know exactly what apartment complex she lived (even if I don’t know the apartment). I was so shocked because it is small town america and the university only has between 8,000-10,000 students. No one knows where EIU is (except for some very dedicated sports fans who remember we made the NCAA playoffs once).As the book progressed I enjoyed it more and more. As it became more about her life in general instead of mostly focused on her weight or her rape. I enjoyed the book more as she herself aged and learn to like herself more. I can very easily see, as her timeline progresses, how she goes from dread and hating herself, to dread, and even possibly love. The more she liked herself, the more I liked her book.And while, to be honest, I will probably never read a Roxanne Gay book, I think I just might be interested in listening to Bad Feminist. #booked2018
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    My Takeaway

    "This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided. People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. They think they know the why of my body. They do not."
    Roxane Gay, Hunger

    Hunger was raw, unfiltered, explicit, heartbreaking and extremely personal. There are a few explicit parts that were hard to read because they were so graphic, still, Gay's writing was phenomenal and incredibly honest. In this memoir, Gay articulately expressed her struggles with her weight, body, and self-image after being gang-raped at the age of 12. I can't praise Gay enough for being so brave and honest. Hunger definitely changed some of the misconceptions and views I held about overweight individuals. I highly recommend this book - especially to those who struggle with their body image. I had the pleasure and honor of meeting Roxane this past June. She was extremely funny, witty and quite shy!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Roxane Gay's Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is devastating, both as a personal memoir and as a critique of social attitudes towards overweight women. She traces her struggle with fat to time when, at age 12, she was gang raped by a boy she thought she was in love with and his friends. Gay believe she started packing on weight as a defense mechanism, an effort to make her unattractive to the opposite sex, but when the epithet "slut" continued to be thrown at her, she asked her parents to let her enroll in a private school. Here, she hoped that she could create a new identity, and she did: the Fat Girl. Thus began years of moving from one place to another, one relationship to another, in hopes of finding acceptance and--contradictorily--invisibility. As a six-foot tall black lesbian feminist who weighed over 575 pounds, this hasn't been an easy quest, and it still continues. In addition to her personal story, Gay explores social biases and pressure against obesity (especially for women), from reality shows like "The Biggest Loser," "Extreme Weight Loss," and "My 600-lb. Life," to celebrity endorsements of weight loss regimens like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers, to the reactions of strangers, ranging from stares of disgust to mocking insults. As someone who has struggled with weight for most of my life, I empathized with her claim that a fat person is never able to relax in public, to remove herself from her body and the feeling (or awareness?) that others are constantly seeing and judging her. I, too, have had those moments of self-hatred, of not daring to share the arm rest on a plane, of being self-conscious about what was in my grocery cart or on my plate in a restaurant. Ultimately, Gay comes to no conclusions. Hers is not a happy before-and-after weight loss story, nor is it a journey towards fat acceptance. If anything, it seeks to expose our society's focus on body image and the damage that can be done when we can't see the person because we allow ourselves to be blinded by the surface. And it chronicles Gay's own continuing efforts to rely on her strengths and positive qualities despite what others see.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Hunger is so much more than a book about weight. Roxane Gay explains what her body went through, what her mind went through, and how that lead to her being here today. She is very vulnerable and I feel like it is a different side of her when compared to her voice in Bad Feminist, which I loved, but this one is more personal and pretty heartbreaking at times.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Benjamin Kalish21 hrs · Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is startling. It is moving and important. It is hard to read and hard to put down.In this memoir of her body Gay puts into words so much that would generally be left unsaid. Gay’s writing is clear and concise. It does not shy from the contradictions in life. It is both restrained and emotional. It is devastating. Gay tells us about her life. She was raped at the age of twelve. She is fat. She is scared. She is complex, intelligent, insightful, compassionate, and a brilliant writer. She lives a privileged life and recognizes her privilege. She is the subjected to great prejudice and discrimination. In Hunger she shares truths that must be incredibly difficult to share and she does so very well.Gay’s book tells us much about her life, but it also tells us much about our culture, our country, our attitudes. We are not kind to fat bodies. We are not kind to women’s bodies. We are not kind to black bodies. We are not kind to ourselves. You probably already know this, but Gay’s book will still open your eyes. Her perspective is probably not one you have heard before.On the back of the dust jacket Ann Patchett tells us why this book is important and I cannot improve on what she says. She writes:“It turns out that when a wrenching past is confronted with wisdom and bravery, the outcome can be compassion and enlightenment—both for the reader who has lived through this kind of unimaginable pain and for the reader who knows nothing of it. Roxane Gay shows us how to be decent to ourselves and decent to one another. Hunger is an amazing achievement in more ways than I can count.”
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Best for: Those who enjoy amazing writing, searing honesty, and vulnerability.

    In a nutshell: Roxane Gay shares a memoir of her life, framed through her relationship with her body.

    Line that sticks with me: There are too many to include all of them. But here’s one: “But the pain of a tattoo is something to which you have to surrender because once you’ve started, you cannot really go back or you’ll be left with something not only permanent but unfinished. I enjoy the irrevocability of that circumstance.” (p 186)

    Why I chose it: It’s Roxane Gay. Come on.

    Review: I was so anxious to read this that instead of visiting my regular bookstore I stopped at chain store in the middle of the work day in a town I happened to be passing through because I wanted to be able to start reading it at the first possible opportunity. Which turned out to be waiting in line at a coffee shop before a meeting. A meeting I was nearly late to because the writing and story are so compelling that I did not want to put it down.

    Dr. Gay (Professor Gay? She has a PhD, so I want to acknowledge that properly) has written a memoir that is unlike any other I’ve read. It feels almost like poetry, as the 300 pages are split into nearly 90 chapters. Some chapters are but a paragraph long; others span multiple pages. The subject matter is challenging, but Prof. Gay’s language is not. As she provides some detail of her rape at a young age, the rape that she describes as a turning point that caused her to build up a physical distance between herself and others through weight gain, she manages to use language that is extremely uncomfortable and horrifying yet possible to read through.

    The book focuses on her relationship with her body and what it is like to be in this world that does not value fat people, but it isn’t a laundry list of the challenges she faces. Yes, there are chapters about the frustrations she deals with when traveling, but Prof. Gay finds a way to discuss it that simultaneously points out all the ways people unintentionally — and intentionally — shun, punish, or otherwise seek to harm fat bodies AND remind us all that this is her experience. She isn’t a headless fat person on the evening news; she is a person who lives in this body, who deserves to be seen and respected. And we as a society — and individuals — fail at this. Hard. And often.

    And people suffer because of it.

    As Prof. Gay points out in the beginning, this is not a ‘before’ and ‘after’ story in the sense that you’ll see her holding up her old clothes and her new, skinny body. She is still a very fat woman. And she is still valuable, and worth love, respect, and basic human decency. She won’t be more of a person if she weighs less.

    This is a book you should read. We live in a world where it is so easy to deny the humanity of those who are not like us. Even some of the progressive folks I know, who would never dare mock someone who is a different race, religion, or sexual orientation than themselves, still make shitty comments about fat people. Still used fat as an insult. Still take joy in seeing other people gain weight. And that’s really fucking shitty.

    I hope you read this book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Hunger is so much more than a book about weight. Roxane Gay explains what her body went through, what her mind went through, and how that lead to her being here today. She is very vulnerable and I feel like it is a different side of her when compared to her voice in Bad Feminist, which I loved, but this one is more personal and pretty heartbreaking at times.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I love that this memoir is so honest. The author refuses to sugarcoat anything and leaves open the distinct possibility that she will never be able to heal from her trauma or lose weight. This is an important work because of that.The only flaw is that the author seems to repeat herself a lot. You're in her thirties, then you're back in her twenties covering the same ground. The book is very short; it seems as though the publisher is trying to spin it out into a big feminist treatise that they can charge $25 for, when you can read it in an hour and many pages don't cover 2/3 of a page in large font. It's a handful of essays, essentially. It doesn't come up to the mark as a memoir.It's excellent, nevertheless. Mesmerizing. Top-notch writing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I love Roxane Gay. I have seen her speak and answer questions on 2 occasions and have seen her on TV and heard her on radio many times. I have always found her to be smart, and funny and to have a unique and not often heard POV. But (there is always a but) I have not really liked much of what I have read of hers. I haven't hated it, I just have not found it interesting or particularly insightful. More importantly, she portrays everything as Roxane against the world, and Roxane is always right. People look at you funny when you say that Bad Feminist was "fine" or "okay" but that is how I felt. I liked some of it but felt more of it was obvious or unoriginal and thought a good deal was arrogant and presumptuous. So Hunger was a surprise, an amazing surprise. Every one of the thousand+ times I have heard someone say that a person was brave to write a book or give a strong performance I have rolled my eyes hard enough to end up with a substantial headache. So I forgive anyone who reads this and rolls their eyes when I say that Roxane Gay was incredibly brave to write this book. She has done something painful to help others, and has done so at considerable risk to herself. Hunger speaks aloud so many things that are seemingly never spoken; it tells a story so many people have to tell, and yet never do. As a fellow fat chick so much of the writing about interacting with the world resonated with me. It is true that in our world being fat makes you invisible, genderless, sexless. It is true that many of us insulate ourselves from rejection and fear with fat at the same time as we know that fat brings on other rejection and breeds other fear. Much of Roxane's story is nothing like mine, but the radical honesty of the parts that parallel my own existence assures me that she has bared all in the other sections as well. If the greatest thing about reading is the opportunity to build empathy (and I think it is) this is a great book.Listened to this read by the author, and the immediacy of her telling her own story enhanced the experience, I recommend the audiobook.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Beautifully narrated. Like listening to an old friend.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book evoked so many feelings in me and had me on the cusp of tears more than once. I've never read anything like it. Everyone should read this book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    What an intense journey; this left me gutted and without a lot to say even though my mind is churning.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Roxane Gay is an amazingly intelligent and articulate feminist author and teacher, yet she comes across in this book as a very damaged, very fragile, very obsessed woman. Probably the first thing most people notice about Gay is her weight - at one time more than 500 pounds, now somewhere in the 200s or 300s. She's big. The fact that she's so many things other than big seems to constantly escape her mind. She was gang raped by friends of her boyfriend at the age of 12 and now, more than 30 years later keeps obsessing about that rape and blames it for her hunger. It's good to show the world that rape has long lasting consequences, but must it ruin one's life forever? Gay is intelligent and articulate, as I mentioned but also respected and loved not just by the general public but personally loved by friends, family and romantic partners. Yet she is massively masochistic. She describes a very bad fracture that she experienced and states that sometimes when a person is in pain only more, even severe pain can lead them to change and heal. She thinks her compound fracture lead her to heal. I wonder how much more damage she will need to inflict on herself before she can stop. I found this a very disturbing book, and I don't see how the writing of it was beneficial to women in general or to her personally. I think maybe it was just another way for her to hurt herself.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book is exactly like having dinner with Roxane Gay while you just shut up and listen intently. I cannot imagine sharing my own innermost secrets and shame with an international audience, albeit in such a calm, reasonable, and resonant voice. Although the devastating fact of her rape and subsequent collapse of self are alluded to throughout, there is not one extra word here. She calls her body "unruly" and herself "a woman of size". I say Roxane Gay is a woman of tremendous stature and a writer of such talent that it is difficult to imagine anyone who could improve on this effort. Or anyone who could write a more horrendous story, although it's probably not uncommon. This needs to be required reading for every woman. Although men would also truly benefit from the book as well, I fear that their probable lack of identification with Gay's saga might make it just another sad story to them, and perhaps unworthy of their gaze. But really, I don't care, as long as women grasp the enormity of what lack of power entails and destroys.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book was haunting and inspiring at the same time. I have been waiting to write a review of it because I am afraid my words won't do it justice. Roxane Gay is a true force of not only words but life. This book holds up a mirror to existence and dares the reader to not only live harder but look deeper at yourself and decide how you choose to exist in the world.
    I actually had to keep rereading it sentence by sentence because there was so much written that I thought had come from me and I had to remember that no, I had not written this amazing work.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Roxane Gay's book about what it's like to live in the world as an obese woman approaches the experience from both universal and starkly personal angles. She's so honest and unflinching in her examination of her own weight, as well as why she is fat, that the book is often difficult to read; I felt that I really shouldn't be privy to such personal information. But Gay is unable to not be completely open, and it's that rawness that makes this book so powerful. Gay ties her very personal experience to the wider one of how society treats larger women, pulling from her own life to demonstrate how ill-equipped and judgmental we are of people who we perceive as lacking control, and especially of women who take up more space than they should. Gay is also a tall woman, at 6'3" making her even more conspicuous than she would be at an average height, making ordinary things difficult, from airline seats to finding clothes. While she was on a book tour for this book, she traveled to Australia and did an interview with a website which subsequently wrote an article about the unique problems accommodating Gay's size posed for them, from having to find a sturdy chair to the onerous task of checking how many pounds the elevator could carry. It was amazing how very much a publication which intended to be sympathetic missed the mark and the whole sordid tale proved Gay's points. It should be noted that had this company planned an interview with a man of similar size, they would have gone about their preparations with a great deal less hysteria and certainly never considered it fodder for an article.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Today I'm going to attempt to form some coherent thoughts about my experience reading Roxane Gay's newest book entitled Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. Some of you might have already had this book on your radar because of the huge amount of press that it got right after its release. This is an extremely personal account of Roxane's experiences as an obese woman in our society (which is obsessed with being skinny as you know). However, it's less a commentary on that than a self-exploration of her relationship with food and her body. You might recognize Gay's name from my review of her frank assessment of feminism and how she identifies herself (not just as a feminist but all-around human). I thought that she had pushed the envelope with her openness and willingness to 'go there' with that book but reading Hunger was a whole new experience. For one thing, this isn't a book about the trials and tribulations of being overweight in America and how she's planning on using this book as a tool to get her life back on track. No, this is a cathartic exercise in purging some of the darkness that she has had buried inside for too long. (I'm trying to not give away too much because her writing of the events of her life is kinda the whole point of the book.) This book will make you rethink the way that you look at your own body and how you make assumptions about other people based on their bodies. It is not meant to be preachy or shaming. It's one woman opening up about a horrific experience in her life and how that changed her forever. I think this is the kind of book that everyone should read because it opens your eyes to yourself, to others, and makes you think. 9/10 definitely recommend
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the bravest book I have ever read. Roxane Gay lays it out all the pain and ugliness she has endured.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Roxane Gay has achieved a lot in her life--she has a PhD and is a New York Times bestselling author--but in her mind she's still "the girl in the woods", the vulnerable twelve year old who was gang-raped by her "boyfriend" and his pals. As the result of this trauma, she over-ate to turn herself into a "fortress" so that she could not be hurt again. Even now, although she's down from her all-time high weight, she writes that her size poses many practical problems, such as finding chairs that are sturdy enough for her to sit on. Even worse are her awkward encounters with well-meaning people who pull things out of her grocery cart or offer unsolicited diet and exercise tips. On top of that, she is prone to bad relationships, self-defeating behavior, and self-loathing.Hunger is Gay's memoir of the difficult times in her life. At times it reads like an extended therapy session. By the end it seems as though she has reached an uneasy truce with her body and her life, but there is no tidy resolution of her issues with food and relationships. Recommended for the many people, especially women, who will be able to relate to Gay's conflicted relationship with her body.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is not an easy read to stomach, but it does have a powerful message about finding your voice.

Book preview

Hunger - Roxane Gay

I

1

Every body has a story and a history. Here I offer mine with a memoir of my body and my hunger.

2

The story of my body is not a story of triumph. This is not a weight-loss memoir. There will be no picture of a thin version of me, my slender body emblazoned across this book’s cover, with me standing in one leg of my former, fatter self’s jeans. This is not a book that will offer motivation. I don’t have any powerful insight into what it takes to overcome an unruly body and unruly appetites. Mine is not a success story. Mine is, simply, a true story.

I wish, so very much, that I could write a book about triumphant weight loss and how I learned how to live more effectively with my demons. I wish I could write a book about being at peace and loving myself wholly, at any size. Instead, I have written this book, which has been the most difficult writing experience of my life, one far more challenging than I could have ever imagined. When I set out to write Hunger, I was certain the words would come easily, the way they usually do. And what could be easier to write about than the body I have lived in for more than forty years? But I soon realized I was not only writing a memoir of my body; I was forcing myself to look at what my body has endured, the weight I gained, and how hard it has been to both live with and lose that weight. I’ve been forced to look at my guiltiest secrets. I’ve cut myself wide open. I am exposed. That is not comfortable. That is not easy.

I wish I had the kind of strength and willpower to tell you a triumphant story. I am in search of that kind of strength and willpower. I am determined to be more than my body—what my body has endured, what my body has become. Determination, though, has not gotten me very far.

Writing this book is a confession. These are the ugliest, weakest, barest parts of me. This is my truth. This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided. People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. They think they know the why of my body. They do not. This is not a story of triumph, but this is a story that demands to be told and deserves to be heard.

This is a book about my body, about my hunger, and ultimately, this is a book about disappearing and being lost and wanting so very much, wanting to be seen and understood. This is a book about learning, however slowly, to allow myself to be seen and understood.

3

To tell you the story of my body, do I tell you how much I weighed at my heaviest? Do I tell you that number, the shameful truth of it always strangling me? Do I tell you I know I should not consider the truth of my body shameful? Or do I just tell you the truth while holding my breath and awaiting your judgment?

At my heaviest, I weighed 577 pounds at six feet, three inches tall. That is a staggering number, one I can hardly believe, but at one point, that was the truth of my body. I learned of the number at a Cleveland Clinic in Weston, Florida. I don’t know how I let things get so out of control, but I do.

My father went with me to Cleveland Clinic. I was in my late twenties. It was July. Outside, it was hot and muggy and lushly green. In the clinic, the air was frigid and antiseptic. Everything was slick, expensive wood, marble. I thought, This is how I am spending my summer vacation.

There were seven other people in the meeting room—an orientation session for gastric bypass surgery—two fat guys, a slightly overweight woman and her thin husband, two people in lab coats, and another large woman. As I surveyed my surroundings, I did that thing fat people tend to do around other fat people—I measured myself in relation to their size. I was bigger than five, smaller than two. At least, that is what I told myself. For $270, I spent a good portion of my day listening to the benefits of having my anatomy drastically altered to lose weight. It was, the doctors said, the only effective therapy for obesity. They were doctors. They were supposed to know what was best for me. I wanted to believe them.

A psychiatrist talked to those of us assembled about how to prepare for the surgery, how to deal with food once our stomachs became the size of a thumb, how to accept that the normal people (his words, not mine) in our lives might try to sabotage our weight loss because they were invested in the idea of us as fat people. We learned how our bodies would be nutrient-deprived for the rest of our lives, how we would never be able to eat or drink within half an hour of doing one or the other. Our hair would thin, maybe fall out. Our bodies could be prone to dumping syndrome, a condition whose name doesn’t require a great deal of imagination to decipher. And of course, there were the surgical risks. We could die on the operating table or succumb to infection in the days following the procedure.

It was a good news/bad news scenario. Bad news: our lives and bodies would never be the same (if we even survived the surgery). Good news: we would be thin. We would lose 75 percent of our excess weight within the first year. We would become next to normal.

What those doctors offered was so tempting, so seductive: this notion that we could fall asleep for a few hours, and within a year of waking up, most of our problems would be solved, at least according to the medical establishment. That is, of course, if we continued to delude ourselves that our bodies were our biggest problem.

After the presentation there was a question-and-answer session. I had neither questions nor answers, but the woman to my right, the woman who clearly did not need to be there because she was no more than forty or so pounds overweight, dominated the session, asking intimate, personal questions that broke my heart. As she interrogated the doctors, her husband sat next to her, smirking. It became clear why she was there. It was all about him and how he saw her body. There is nothing sadder, I thought, choosing to ignore why I was sitting in that same room, choosing to ignore that there were a great many people in my own life who saw my body before they ever saw or considered me.

Later in the day, the doctors showed videos of the surgery—cameras and surgical tools in slick inner cavities cutting, pushing, closing, removing essential parts of the human body. The insides were steamy red and pink and yellow. It was grotesque and chilling. My father, on my left, was ashen, clearly shaken by the brutal display. What do you think? he asked quietly. This is a total freak show, I said. He nodded. This was the first thing we had agreed on in years. Then the video ended and the doctor smiled and chirped that the procedure was brief, done laparoscopically. He assured us he had done over three thousand operations, lost only one patient—an 850-pound man, he said, his voice dropping to an apologetic whisper, as if the shame of that man’s body could not be spoken with the full force of his voice. Then, the doctor told us the price of happiness—$25,000, minus a $270 discount for the orientation fee once a deposit for the procedure was made.

Before this torment was over, there was a one-on-one consultation with the doctor in a private examination room. Before the doctor entered, his assistant, an intern, took down my vital information. I was weighed, measured, quietly judged. The intern listened to my heartbeat, felt my throat glands, made some additional notes. The doctor finally breezed in after half an hour. He looked me up and down. He glanced at my new chart, quickly flipping through the pages. Yes, yes, he said. You’re a perfect candidate for the surgery. We’ll get you booked right away. Then he was gone. The intern wrote me prescriptions for the preliminary tests I would need, and I left with a letter verifying that I’d completed the orientation session. It was clear that they did this every day. I was not unique. I was not special. I was a body, one requiring repair, and there are many of us in this world, living in such utterly human bodies.

My father, who had been waiting in the well-appointed atrium, put a hand on my shoulder. You’re not at this point yet, he said. A little more self-control. Exercising twice a day. That’s all you need. I agreed, nodding vigorously, but later, alone in my bedroom, I pored over the pamphlets I had received, unable to look away from the before/after pictures. I wanted, I still want, that after so badly.

And I remembered the result of being weighed and measured and judged, the unfathomable number: 577 pounds. I thought I had known shame in my life, but that night, I truly knew shame. I did not know if I would ever find my way past that shame and toward a place where I could face my body, accept my body, change my body.

4

This book, Hunger, is a book about living in the world when you are not a few or even forty pounds overweight. This is a book about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight, when you are not obese or morbidly obese but super morbidly obese according to your body mass index, or BMI.

BMI is a term that sounds so technical and inhumane that I am always eager to disregard the measure. Nonetheless, it is a term, and a measure, that allows the medical establishment to try and bring a sense of discipline to undisciplined bodies.

One’s BMI is one’s weight, in kilograms, divided by the square of one’s height in meters. Math is hard. There are various markers that then define the amount of unruliness a human body might carry. If your BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9, you are normal. If your BMI is 25 or higher, you are overweight. If your BMI is 30 or higher, you are obese, and if your BMI is higher than 40, you are morbidly obese, and if the measure is higher than 50, you are super morbidly obese. My BMI is higher than 50.

In truth, many medical designations are arbitrary. It is worth noting that in 1998, medical professionals, under the direction of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, lowered the BMI threshold for normal bodies to below 25 and, in doing so, doubled the number of obese Americans. One of their reasons for lowering the cutoff: A round number like 25 would be easy for people to remember.

These terms themselves are somewhat horrifying. Obese is an unpleasant word from the Latin obesus, meaning having eaten until fat, which is, in a literal sense, fair enough. But when people use the word obese, they aren’t merely being literal. They are offering forth an accusation. It is strange, and perhaps sad, that medical doctors came up with this terminology when they are charged with first doing no harm. The modifier morbidly makes the fat body a death sentence when such is not the case. The term morbid obesity frames fat people like we are the walking dead, and the medical establishment treats us accordingly.

The cultural measure for obesity often seems to be anyone who appears to be larger than a size 6, or anyone whose body doesn’t naturally cater to the male gaze, or anyone with cellulite on her thighs.

I do not weigh 577 pounds now. I am still very fat, but I weigh about 150 pounds less than that. With every new diet attempt I shave off a few pounds here, a few pounds there. This is all relative. I am not small. I will never be small. For one, I am tall. That is both a curse and a saving grace. I have presence, I am told. I take up space. I intimidate. I do not want to take up space. I want to go unnoticed. I want to hide. I want to disappear until I gain control of my body.

I don’t know how things got so out of control, or I do. This is my refrain. Losing control of my body was a matter of accretion. I began eating to change my body. I was willful in this. Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure another such violation, and so I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away. Even at that young age, I understood that to be fat was to be undesirable to men, to be beneath their contempt, and I already knew too much about their contempt. This is what most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.

5

What you need to know is that my life is split in two, cleaved not so neatly. There is the before and the after. Before I gained weight. After I gained weight. Before I was raped. After I was raped.

6

In the before of my life, I was so very young and sheltered. I knew nothing about anything. I didn’t know I could suffer or the breadth and scope of what suffering could be. I didn’t know that I could give voice to my suffering when I did suffer. I didn’t know there were better ways to deal with my suffering. Of all the things I wish I knew then that I know now, I wish I had known I could talk to my parents and get help, and turn to something other than food. I wish I had known that my violation was not my fault.

What I did know was food, so I ate because I understood that I could take up more space. I could become more solid, stronger, safer. I understood, from the way I saw people stare at fat people, from the way I stared at fat people, that too much weight was undesirable. If I was undesirable, I could keep more hurt away. At least, I hoped I could keep more hurt away because in the after, I knew too much about hurt. I knew too much about hurt, but I didn’t know how much more a girl could suffer until I did.

But. This is what I did. This is the body I made. I am corpulent—rolls of brown flesh, arms and thighs and belly. The fat eventually had nowhere to go, so it created its own paths around my body. I am riven with stretch marks, pockets of cellulite on my massive thighs. The fat created a new body, one that shamed me but one that made me feel safe, and more than anything, I desperately needed to feel safe. I needed to feel like a fortress, impermeable. I did not want anything or anyone to touch me.

I did this to myself. This is my fault and my responsibility. This is what I tell myself, though I should not bear the responsibility for this body alone.

7

This is the reality of living in my body: I am trapped in a cage. The frustrating thing about cages is that you’re trapped but you can see exactly what you want. You can reach out from the cage, but only so far.

It would be easy to pretend I am just fine with my body as it is. I wish I did not see my body as something for which I should apologize or provide explanation. I’m a feminist and I believe in doing away with the rigid beauty standards that force women to conform to unrealistic ideals. I believe we should have broader definitions of beauty that include diverse body types. I believe it is so important for women to feel comfortable in their bodies, without wanting to change every single thing about their bodies to find that comfort. I (want to) believe my worth as a human being does not reside in my size or appearance. I know, having grown up in a culture that is generally toxic to women and constantly trying to discipline women’s bodies, that it is important to resist unreasonable standards for how my body or any body should look.

What I know and what I feel are two very different things.

Feeling comfortable in my body isn’t entirely about beauty standards. It is not entirely about ideals. It’s about how I feel in my skin and bones, from one day to the next.

I am not comfortable in my body. Nearly everything physical is difficult. When I move around, I feel every extra pound I am carrying. I have no stamina. When I walk for long periods of time, my thighs and calves ache. My feet ache. My lower back aches. More often than not, I am in some kind of physical pain. Every morning, I am so stiff I contemplate just spending the duration of the day in bed. I have a pinched nerve, and so if I stand for too long, my right leg goes numb and then I sort of lurch about until the feeling returns.

When it’s hot, I sweat profusely, mostly from my head, and then I feel self-conscious and find myself constantly wiping the sweat from my face. Rivulets of sweat spring forth between my breasts and pool at the base of my spine. My shirt gets

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