On Roxane Gay’s ‘Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body’

Gay’s memoir of sexual assault and body image offers reality, honesty, and the knowledge that the struggle will continue.

Roxane Gay
Nonfiction | Memoir
320 Pages
5.5” x 8.25”
Hardcover
Available in All eBook Formats
Review Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 978–0–06–236259–9
First Edition
Harper/Harper Collins
New York City, New York
Available HERE
$25.99

There is a certain formula to “survival” or “addiction” memoirs that, if you’re fluent with the genre, you know well: writer is fine, writer falls, writer hits rock bottom, and then his story finishes with how not only he’s survived what he’s been through, but how he’s “healed.” We are looking to see how survivors are phoenixes, rising from the ashes of their self-destruction. We want to be fed the idea that we, too, can rise from our downfalls, pick ourselves up, and that everything does, in fact, get better. What Roxane Gay presents in her debut memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, is not this type of survival.

When we consider the word “hunger,” we associate it first and foremost with food. And while Gay touches on food in her memoir, there is a deeper hunger for something else — something more — that is the undercurrent in each section and in each chapter. A hunger for healing, not just in the sense of her body, but in her mind, as well. In an unflinching account of her childhood rape, Gay offers the catalyst in her weight gain. On page 14, she writes:

There is the before and the after. Before I gained weight. After I gained weight. Before I was raped. After I was raped.

While this event happened when she was 12, Gay, now 42, writes how she continues to struggle with the aftermath: of not being able to trust, of how she needs the comfort her size gives her, and how hard it is to love.

But it’s not just the sexual trauma that Gay works through in her memoir. Her weight gain, her classification as “morbidly obese” is traumatic in and of itself due to the way society — especially medical professionals — treats someone her size. Ranging from camps to diets to even eating disorders, Gay takes us through her battle with mental and physical health, familiar pressures to be thin and excellent, and what being “healthy” actually means. Further still, she examines how “healthy” and “happy” are linked in society’s preconceived notions of these ideas and how they apply specifically to women.

The story of my life is wanting, hungering, for what I cannot have or, perhaps, wanting what I dare not allow myself to have.

(p. 176)

What Gay offers in her memoir isn’t that bright shining ray of hope that healing will come at the end of a book. Instead, she offers reality: that while this book might have been finished, she is not finished. Her struggle will continue. But through that honesty, a reader struggling through body issues, sexual trauma, or even addiction can find some comfort in know that he isn’t alone. Someone else out there is feeling what he’s feeling, who shares the same struggles as he does.

We are not alone in our hungering.