“Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body” by Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay used to scare me. I admired her and thought she was a fine writer, but found her criticisms of authors and literary works scathing. I imagined her a fierce opponent to cultural appropriation, and, as a white woman writing about black people, I was intimidated by her.

Then I read HUNGER.

“I don’t know why I can’t just eat like a normal person,” Roxane says. “Or I do.”

This is how Roxanne writes about her struggle with her fluctuating weight, five hundred and ninety nine pounds at its highest, and about the trauma she experienced after a horrible rape as a girl. “I don’t know why I never told anyone,” she says. “Or I do.”

As a therapist, I know Roxanne is dissociating as protection from remembering unspeakable terror. Part of her understands why she needs to soothe herself with food and can’t eat like a “normal” person. Part of her can’t bear to remember. She lives with this disparity. She knows it. And she doesn’t.

Throughout the book, I was amazed and touched at Roxanne’s vulnerability, at how brave she is to live the public life she lives in spite of her discomfort with her body and with traveling and with exposure when a piece of her wants nothing more than to hide. I’ve always seen her as a good writer. Now I see her as a fine, courageous person making the best of an excruciatingly hard situation.

I see her as a spokesperson, too, for victims of rape and other traumas that lead to eating disorders, and for people who struggle with obesity. She is not pitiful. She is not whiney. She is as true to herself as she can possibly be, and she opens herself to the reader, inviting us to understand, to wonder.

There’s no neat ending, no pretense of being “fixed”, in HUNGER. Roxane’s got a ways to go, and she knows it. Or she doesn’t.

HUNGER is not easy. I felt anger and distress and sadness as I read it. But it’s good. It took me inside it. And Roxanne doesn’t scare me so much anymore. I mostly just love her.