![hunger roxane gay tour hunger roxane gay tour](https://events.kcrw.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/RoxaneGay_June26-400x266.jpg)
Unaware of the rape, and meaning well, Gay's parents sent her to a fitness camp in the Berkshires of Massachusetts when she was in high school. Gay writes that she had a healthy attitude toward food before she turned to it as a coping mechanism. She now categorizes her life in two parts: the before, and the after. It was a scenario I'll describe as sickening and monstrous. At 12, Gay was raped by multiple schoolmates. Hunger is as much a memoir of Gay's body as it is a memoir of the aftermath of sexual assault. A body that does not appeal to the gaze of any given adjudicator is just as likely to be intentional, for any number of reasons. (Indeed, days ago, Australian website Mamamia apologized for the hideously thoughtless way Gay's body was described in a blurb introducing a podcast on which she appeared.)ĭespite being inundated with recherché body narratives – protein powders, detox teas, the sect of CrossFit, the sect of thin people eating ice cream on Instagram, within the consciousness at large there exists this false idea that bodies are whatever they are – you're either healthy and empowered or you're not. "I am never allowed to forget the realities of my body, how my body offends the sensibilities of others, how my body dares to take up too much space and how I dare to be confident, how I dare to use my voice, how I dare to believe in the value of my voice both in spite of and because of my body," she writes.
![hunger roxane gay tour hunger roxane gay tour](https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/dYpmAqoZthMIwXT3rIDe35S7Nrs=/0x108:1500x893/fit-in/1200x630/cdn1.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8816169/July_Book_Club_Site.jpg)
But it is Gay's internal melee that truly digs into the complicated matter of not just having a body (that's labyrinthine enough), but having a body that others see as a spectacle despite the inhabitant making no such claim. Silent protests of dignity between herself and others, the Housing Works story as one example, are throughout. Hunger is perhaps one of the most honest texts ever published by a woman in a body of size. There are truths in this book many others will know dearly. There are truths in this book many will be hearing for the first time. (Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer and Khloe Kardashian have all cashed in on chubby-girl personas, despite not being plus-size.) Gay may not consider her story a "success," but claiming the space in which to write fiercely about her body, when so few narratives in pop culture's body-acceptance arena are genuine – earned – is powerful. Too often, body-acceptance discourse is driven by celebrities who aren't actually overweight.
![hunger roxane gay tour hunger roxane gay tour](https://video-images.vice.com/articles/594a9cff0eb94b16014be57d/lede/1498066573603-pjimage-14-1.jpeg)
"This is a book about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight," she says. Gay makes it clear that this memoir is not about the experience of being moderately heavy. I've been forced to look at my guiltiest secrets. 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. A bestselling author and contributing writer at The New York Times, Gay calls the process of finishing Hunger the most difficult writing endeavour of her life: "I was certain the words would come easily, the way they usually do. "Mine is not a success story," Gay writes early on, squashing any preconceived assumptions that this memoir is about weight loss, as so many body stories are. To read these experiences consolidated in one place, written so clear-heartedly, is to understand the exhaustion of living in a body under surveillance. "Sometimes I have a flashback to the humiliation of that evening and I shudder." She writes of going to the doctor only if she really has to in order to spare herself the shaming of the indignities involved in air travel of the unsolicited evaluations from strangers. "I was filled with self-loathing of an intense degree for the next several days," she writes. Gay and the other authors were expected to climb up, despite the sheer inaccessibility of the expectation. Gay tells the story of giving a reading at the Housing Works bookstore in New York. In Roxane Gay's new memoir, Hunger, these intrusions happen every day, verbally or otherwise.