Out of some mixture of shame and shock, she kept the rape a secret from her devoted and loving parents for many years, though other children around her knew about it at the time and tormented her for being a “slut.” Gay, who is well known as a fiction writer and feminist cultural critic, has publicly acknowledged the rape before, but she confronts it very directly here, conveying its breathtaking cruelty in a way that’s tough to read but makes the enduring aftermath fully understandable. Gay was gang-raped when she was twelve years old, lured to an isolated cabin by a boyfriend, who led the assault.
In a culture that relentlessly shames fat people, it’s an act of courage for anyone Gay’s size simply to write honestly and without apology about her physical existence, but she goes much farther here, confronting the traumatic roots of her condition and revealing her ongoing struggle to make some kind of peace with her body and with her own emotional and physical hunger. The book explores, frankly and in detail, what it’s like to live in a body the world feels entitled to judge. Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body tells the story of why and how she became morbidly obese.
