And when she did find him, she had no doubt (“There are some faces you don’t forget”) but sat for hours staring at his face on her computer screen. Finding him “became a minor obsession,” she says. Toward the end of the book, in a breathtaking chapter, Gay writes of tracking the boy down online, years later. That terseness holds back a mountain of feelings.Īnd everything circles back, again and again, to that hunting cabin in the woods. They course with deep anger and palpable pain. But oh, how powerful those paragraphs are. Her sentences are short, as are her chapters-some are just one paragraph, or just one page.
Gay writes in measured, sometimes terse, tones. “I reserve my most elaborate delusions and disappointments for myself,” she says, and sometimes you want to tell her, forgive yourself. She is as hard on herself as she is on society, on the rapist. She knows that we have no right to judge. The lives people have led: We have no idea. They can plainly see that a given chair might be too small, but they say nothing as they watch me try to squeeze myself into a seat.” “This is an unspoken humiliation, a lot of the time,” she writes. She examines diets and clothes and furniture and sex and popular culture and the looks that people give her. Gay writes about what it physically feels like to be large, and she writes about the way the world views her.
“Hunger” is about both the profound effects of this childhood violence, and about the profound effects of growing to such a size. She ate her body into a fortress-at its largest, well over 500 pounds. It is no surprise that after the rape she grew as big as she could possibly grow. Just before the gang rape, as the boys mocked her and laughed, she felt “smaller and smaller,” she writes. Gay was still a child when this terrible crime took place, just 12 years old. “He was a good boy from a good family living in a good neighborhood, but he hurt me in the worst ways.” He lured her to an old hunting cabin in the woods where several of his friends waited, and “where no one but those boys could hear me scream.” “What you need to know is that my life is split in two,” she writes, “cleaved not so neatly. In her fierce and devastating memoir, 'Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body,' essayist Roxane Gay explores all of these desires, desires that have seized control of her body and deeply affected her life. We hunger for food, for love, for romance, for safety.
In the 30 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 15 announcement of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member and autobiography committee chairman Laurie Hertzel offers an appreciation of autobiography finalist Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Harper).