Book Review: Hunger

Roxane Gay is the brilliant author of the New York Times bestseller, Bad Feminist. She holds a prestigious position as a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She’s a novelist, a short-story writer, a professor, and a voice that untold numbers of devoted fans clamor to hear. She comes from a close, loving family of thin, stylish, and accomplished Haitian immigrants. She is also “super morbidly obese,” an actual official category that includes people who are three or four hundred pounds overweight. Her new book Hunger is her riveting memoir of life as a fat person. “No matter what I accomplish,” writes Gay, “I will be fat, first and foremost.” Each of the eighty-eight chapters of Hunger are short. Gay’s writing style seems to say: I’m telling you this story straight. I’m not going to dance around it. Roxane Gay wishes she had told her life-shattering story a very long time ago. At age 12, when she was little and cute, her boyfriend brought her out to a remote cabin where he and his friends gang-raped her. She wishes she had shared her account with her family, her friends, or anyone else who would have listened and told her that it was not her fault and that she was not alone. “I don’t want to be defined by the worst thing that has happened to me,” Gay tells us. “At the same time, I don’t want to be silent.” She also does not welcome the predictable responses to stories like hers. “I do not want pity or appreciation or advic...
Source: Psych Central - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Tags: Abuse Book Reviews Eating Disorders LGBTQ PTSD Trauma being fat fat memoir Source Type: news