Many of the chapters in Hunger first appeared online on xoJane, GOOD, and The Toast, and are reproduced here almost unchanged. But a critique of her style would be elitist and pointless-her many fans love her regardless, and her work does not ask to be read as literary. She writes flat, unshowy sentences: When it works, there’s an enjoyable clarity and impassiveness to her delivery when it doesn’t, it’s mundane and repetitive. Although warm and accessible, her prose is also uneven, bland, and cliché-prone.
Hunger roxane gay chapter by chapter review full#
The closest equivalent to the book’s tone is that of a ghostwritten celebrity autobiography: gossipy and full of minute and sometimes banal detail. Gay presents these ideas with a light touch. At one point, she visits a clinic where a surgeon recommends brutal and expensive stomach-stapling surgery that leaves patients “nutrient-deprived for the rest of our lives.” She declines, but the anecdote makes clear that the so-called obesity epidemic is a phantasmic problem, conjured up mostly by cultural anxieties fat people are not offensive to others because they are unhealthy, but because their bodies are, as Gay puts it, “unruly.” Fat people’s mental and physical well-being often becomes collateral damage to a neoliberal conception of the ideal body as both perfectly healthy and subject to endless improvement.
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I see the pattern of bruising inching from my waist down to my midthigh.” A common perception of fat as a moral failing, combined with an equally widespread ignorance of or even contempt for fat people’s accessibility needs, frequently leaves Gay feeling unable to so much as voice her discomfort. Even everyday objects are rendered hurtful: “I cram my body into seats that are not meant to accommodate me. In Hunger’s most striking passages, Gay vividly describes her experiences of moving through a bitterly fatphobic world, where fat people are vulnerable to insult and assault not only by strangers but also close relatives, lovers, and doctors. An Untamed State is illuminated by Hunger in the light of the latter, the former reads in part like Gay’s attempt to work through in fiction her sense of isolation from her family. Her white mother-in-law nurses her back to health after Mireille is abducted and brutally raped by poor Haitians and then abandoned by her wealthy businessman father, who refuses on principle to pay a ransom. It’s a neo-blaxploitation story set in a lawless Haiti, where aspects of Gay’s real-life rape by white boys seem to have been transposed onto the fictional, thin, and conventionally beautiful body of Mireille. Echoes of that rebellion are faintly perceptible in her 2014 novel An Untamed State. Reflecting this complex class position, they paid for a bourgeois US education for their daughter, sending her to Exeter and then to Yale, where she dropped out at nineteen. This is what I remind myself so I can forgive them.” Gay’s parents are wealthy Haitian immigrants with high-level business and government connections in Port-au-Prince. Gay’s reading of her own body as a painful symptom seems to originate not only in the terrible rape but also in a complex family dynamic wherein her fatness has been treated as if it were the message rather than the medium: “My parents, and my father in particular, make inquiries as to whether I am dieting, exercising, and/or losing weight as if all I am is my big fat body. Although Gay stops short of saying this explicitly, her new weight must also have been a way to make her pain concrete and visible, and yet her parents, fellow students, and teachers fail to notice that she is desperately sad: “They saw me plainly while looking right through me.” Even when, more than twenty years later, her parents finally learn of her rape, from a 2014 review in Time magazine, her mother is evasive: “It was enough to talk around the truth rather than stare it down.” I created a distinct boundary between myself and anyone who dared to approach me.” Gay interprets her weight gain as an attempt to “hide in plain sight” (the phrase recurs often), to conceal her secret. After a horrifying rape at the age of twelve, she became very fat in order to protect herself: “I made myself bigger. The first four chapters start with a variation on “This is the story of my body.” Chapter 2 begins: “The story of my body is not a story of triumph.” Wary of discourses that politicize and often celebrate fat, such as body positivity or queer feminism, Gay presents a sad history of her size. Roxane Gay’s heartfelt new memoir Hunger puts its author’s struggle to write it front and center.