Roxane Gay's 'Hunger' Breaks Down Body Disassociation
Monday February 18th, 2019
In her memoir, Roxane Gay opens readers up to her relationship with her body: disassociation with feeling and experiencing sensation after her childhood trauma.
Hunger is a memoir written by Roxane Gay. It was published on June 13th, 2017 and it is 320 pages long. Hunger is a personal account of Roxane Gay's life, largely consumed by her weight. She addresses her experience of living in a body without control of her size and lacking the discipline that society encourages women to have over their bodies.
She goes through encounters with her body from a childhood shaken by sexual assault, her 20s, which she calls her "lost years", and becoming an established writer. We follow her as the trauma she was subjected to at 12 years old, follows her relationship with her body until adulthood. She ate to cope with her sorrow and to protect herself from being hurt.
She believed that if she shrouded herself with weight, perhaps she would be so intolerable that she would ultimately be free of male dominion over her body. Hunger is the story of being overweight when "the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes".
Roxane Gay was born in October of 1974 to Haitian immigrants in Omaha, Nebraska. She was sexually assaulted at the age of twelve which contributed to a subsequent overeating disorder. These habits were formed as a way to manage her pain and trauma as well as regain control of her body. She went away to boarding school shortly after the incident, in addition to weight loss camps nearly every summer. As she approached her teenage years, she began to write as an outlet for her frustration and healing. She often made fictional, female characters who were traumatized or taken advantage of.
Currently, Gay is championed as a feminist author, professor, editor, commentator, and activist. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Bad Feminist. She writes fictional short stories, autobiography and socio/political commentaries. She is a former writer of World of Wakanda and was one of the first Black women to be a lead writer for Marvel. She is also a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, the co-founder of PANK magazine, editor of The Rumpus and publisher of Tiny Hardcore Press. She works as an associate professor of English at Purdue University and she is openly bi-sexual.
Her story is deeply personal, making a political statement about expectations of womanhood and gender, sexuality, trauma and hope. We learn how her body has "informed" her feminism and taught her about the greater machines of society demonizing fat bodies and that work so hard to produce unrealistic standards that we hunger for.
