Book review: Hunger by Roxane Gay

Book cover Hunger by Roxane Gay. Showing a white background with a picture of a silver fork and the title Hunger by Roxane Gay in black script.

TRIGGER WARNING: Hunger by Roxane Gay contains multiple mentions of rape. This book review discusses rape, and its ensuing damage, in detail.

The first thing that strikes me about Hunger, is how real and raw it is. There is no dressing up the truth . Gay was gang raped at 12 years old. And now, she is morbidly obese.

Gay can make a link between these two facts, and traces her intense relationship with food back to the trauma of the brutal assault. She told no one about the attack, instead seeking solace in food as a way to repress her feelings and comfort herself. And perhaps unconsciously, or consciously, she writes how she,
“Ate and ate and ate to build my body into a fortress.”

Roxanne Gay teaches creative writing at Yale University. But the writing of Gay’s own memoir is controlled, stark and bold. Perhaps reflecting the content of the book. In Hunger by Roxane Gay, there’s no padding, no qualifying and no extraneous words. Just the brutal truth.

Food as a way to manage difficult feelings

As a counsellor, I’m familiar with the idea that food, like other substances, can be used to dampen down traumatic feelings. Back in 1978, psychotherapist Susie Orbach wrote Fat is a Feminist Issue. In her book she explored the relationship between feelings, food and women’s relationships with their bodies.

However Hunger by Roxane Gay is different because it provides a first person account of the reality of living in an overweight body. And the casual cruelty, she contends with every day.

Men shouting insults from cars, people’s faces dropping with disappointment when they realise she’s the author they’re hosting and general contempt whenever she boards an aeroplane.

The aftermath of rape and sexual assault

But there is another reason why Roxanne Gay’s book is outstanding, and it’s because she dares to tell the whole, confusing truth about being a sexual assault survivor. She thinks obsessively about the perpetrator. Searching coffee shops near where he works, looking at his photo on his company website and occasionally calling his office. There is no neat forgiveness or closure in this memoir, nor should there be.

She also details the devastating unwanted impact the assault had on her sex life, and her sense of self as a sexual person. She writes, “Does he know that for years I could not stop what he started? I wonder what he would think if he knew that unless I thought of him I felt nothing at all while having sex.”

This honesty isn’t often encountered outside of the therapy room. But Hunger by Roxane Gay provides a stark account of the aftermath of a sexual assault. She shines a spotlight on the impact of trauma on her mind and body, and her continuing struggle to process the rape and inhabit a body type that so disparaged by society.

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