But I guess, on the other hand, telling these stories is cathartic. I’m resentful of the way that fat people and also, especially, rape victims are expected to just flay themselves and let any old person dig around inside them to earn their humanity. I sat down with her at home in Los Angeles. Gay may not want to be a spokesperson for all fat people - Hunger is adamantly her story, not a universal story - but the fact is that thin people will read this book and be changed. Lines such as, “I am always uncomfortable or in pain,” leave you no wiggle room to turn away from empathy. There’s something about honesty this bare - you cannot argue with it.
We don’t hold back when we talk to ourselves about ourselves, and that’s what Gay has given us here: elegantly rendered essays with the intimacy of an inner monologue. But, you realise, anything less would be dishonest. You yearn for Gay to be a little kinder to herself as she glides through her past, reckoning with all the things she did with her body and, more significantly, the things that were done to it.
Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body was described to me by multiple people as an almost unbearably brutal book, and it is.
