Hunger roxane gay goodread
One of the few scenes rendered in detail is the gruesome early description of her father taking her to a group consultation with a doctor who performs gastric bypass surgeries. Some of the book’s repetitions may be due to its origin in shorter pieces written for various publications, but most reflect the near-constant frustrations of living in a body the world both fixates on and refuses to accommodate.
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Gay alludes to or summarises difficult conversations, but rarely recounts them in full, and the overall effect is often one of claustrophobic intensity, as if the reader is trapped inside her head much the way she describes feeling caged in her flesh. Scoffing at Oprah Winfrey’s metaphor of the cheerful, skinny alter ego lurking inside every fat person, she notes, “I ate that thin woman, and she was delicious but unsatisfying.”īut in general there’s not much to laugh about. You know that.” She occasionally makes light of the cliches that surround public discussion of weight loss (though she herself can’t avoid some of these). Gay’s tone shifts between a breezy, conversational style and something harsher, and she recounts painful events in short, almost incantatory sentences: “There was a boy. At the supermarket, random people entitle themselves to remove foods they deem unsuitable from her cart.
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Unable to fit on a restaurant chair and denied a more comfortable booth, she spends an entire meal holding herself up in an excruciating squat. Particularly striking are the depictions of what it’s like for Gay to go to the gym or on a date. She eventually completes a PhD and garners acclaim as a writer, but this book is still a catalogue of horrors large and small: there are abusive relationships and public humiliations. Gay, who attends an elite boarding school followed by Yale, drops out and moves to another state without letting anyone know where she is. Gay’s mother and father are well-to-do Haitian Americans who clearly have high expectations of their children. Various attempts to reverse it, some undertaken willingly, others under parental pressure, never last long, and both the traumatic event and her highly visible response to it overshadow everything else that happens to her. “I fell asleep most nights,” Gay writes, “flush with the joy of knowing I belonged to these people and they belonged to me.” Gay’s tone shifts from a breezy conversational style to something harsher – the book is crammed with agonising ironiesĪfterwards, everything changes: she begins to overeat and her weight gain is swift and dramatic, to her family’s dismay. The brief evocation of her childhood before this point conjures an almost fairytale-like atmosphere of love and optimism, peopled with adoring parents and siblings. Gay blames herself, and her suffering is compounded when the boys report their version of events to their peers at school she keeps hers quiet, unable to say anything about it to her family. The first of these hinges on the horrifying rape visited on her as a 12-year-old by her boyfriend and several of his friends. Hunger comprises at least two stories: a partial but more or less linear telling of Gay’s life so far, and a more halting, spiralling description of her everyday experience as a fat woman.
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People asking those kinds of questions don’t deserve an answer, and yet here Gay has decided to give them one. No doubt Gay is thoroughly sick of being reduced to her body and of enduring constant inquiries, prejudices and criticism, and she has evidently worked hard to make space for herself to talk and write about other things. Simply leaving the house means navigating a physical and emotional obstacle course. Doctors not only patronise her but routinely refuse her basic care. Shopping for clothes or food, visiting a restaurant or getting on a plane frequently involve a humiliating ordeal.