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![Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by [Roxane Gay]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41tjM2rqynL._SY346_.jpg)
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body Kindle Edition
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From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.
“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.”
In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.
With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper
- Publication dateJune 13, 2017
- File size1147 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Review
“A work of staggering honesty . . . . Poignantly told.” -- New Republic
“The book’s short, sharp chapters come alive in vivid personal anecdotes. . . . And on nearly every page, Gay’s raw, powerful prose plants a flag, facing down decades of shame and self-loathing by reclaiming the body she never should have had to lose.” -- Entertainment Weekly
“Bracingly vivid. . . . Remarkable. . . . Undestroyed, unruly, unfettered, Ms. Gay, live your life. We are all better for having you do so in the same ferociously honest fashion that you have written this book.” -- Los Angeles Times
“Searing, smart, readable. . . . “Hunger,” like Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” interrogates the fortunes of black bodies in public spaces. . . . Nothing seems gratuitous; a lot seems brave. There is an incantatory element of repetition to “Hunger”: The very short chapters scallop over the reader like waves.” -- Newsday
“Luminous. . . . intellectually rigorous and deeply moving.” -- The New York Times Book Review
“Her spare prose, written with a raw grace, heightens the emotional resonance of her story, making each observation sharper, each revelation more riveting. . . . It is a thing of raw beauty.” -- USA Today
“Powerful. . . . fierce. . . . Gay has a vivid, telegraphic writing style, which serves her well. Repetitive and recursive, it propels the reader forward with unstoppable force.” -- Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers
“This is the book to read this summer . . . she’s such a compelling mind . . . . Anyone who has a body should read this book.” -- Isaac Fitzgerald on the Today show
“Unforgettable. . . . Breathtaking. . . . We all need to hear what Gay has to say in these pages. . . . Gay says hers is not a success story because it’s not the weight-loss story our culture demands, but her breaking of her own silence, her movement from shame and self-loathing toward honoring and forgiving and caring for herself, is in itself a profound victory.” -- San Francisco Chronicle --This text refers to the paperback edition.
About the Author
Roxane Gay is the author of the essay collection Bad Feminist, which was a New York Times bestseller; the novel An Untamed State, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize; the memoir Hunger, which was a New York Times bestseller and received a National Book Critics Circle citation; and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, she has also written for Time, McSweeney’s, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Bookforum, and Salon. Her fiction has also been selected for The Best American Short Stories 2012, The Best American Mystery Stories 2014, and other anthologies. She is the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She lives in Lafayette, Indiana, and sometimes Los Angeles.
--This text refers to the paperback edition.From the Back Cover
“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one I made but barely recognized or understood but of my own making. I was miserable, but I was safe.”
In this intimate and searing memoir, the New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay addresses the experience of living in a body that she calls “wildly undisciplined.” She casts an insightful and critical eye over her childhood, teens, and twenties—including the devastating act of violence that was a turning point in her young life—and brings readers intwo the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life.
With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and it tells a story that hasn’t yet been told but needs to be.
--This text refers to the hardcover edition.From the Inside Flap
"I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one I made but barely recognized or understood but of my own making. I was miserable, but I was safe."
In this intimate and searing memoir, the New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay addresses the experience of living in a body that she calls "wildly undisciplined." She casts an insightful and critical eye over her childhood, teens, and twenties--including the devastating act of violence that was a turning point in her young life--and brings readers intwo the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life.
With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and it tells a story that hasn't yet been told but needs to be.
--Entertainment Weekly --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Product details
- ASIN : B013PKAFOC
- Publisher : Harper; Reprint edition (June 13, 2017)
- Publication date : June 13, 2017
- Language : English
- File size : 1147 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 197 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #84,026 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #89 in Biographies & Memoirs of Authors
- #192 in Dysfunctional Relationships
- #237 in Abusive Family Relationships
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Harper’s Bazaar, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and New York Times bestselling Hunger: A Memoir of My Body. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2019
Top reviews from the United States
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Like it's meant to be some kind of fairy tale, or the lesson to be learned is meant to leave the reader feeling accomplished and good. Like wisdom always feels good or something.
Or the 5-star ratings that praise this as though it's this suspenseful and emotionally captivating read—which I personally feel is misleading and such a misrepresentation of why this book exists.
"LOVE IT!!!" feels cheap. Calling this book amazing feels like a lie.
When I started reading Hunger, I knew I was going into a memoir that was probably going to feel very uncomfortable; both in just reading about the real trauma a real person had experienced, and the fact that I have also suffered trauma. I am also obese and have experienced the fear of losing weight for the same reasons the author has and does. I get it and I felt myself bearing down and then a dull sense of disturbance fill my stomach as I got closer to what I knew lived in the pages of this memoir.
I read a life that seemed very similar to mine; at a certain point I even felt a sting of annoyance that someone wrote down my story and got the success that I probably could've had a long time ago. I lived this life, in my own ways—so much of it was terribly familiar to me. Some moments mirrored my own, and some situations I couldn't even begin to imagine myself in.
I'm wondering if those who got nothing out of this really missed the point of what Roxane's memoir is. She's not here to teach us a moral, or to leave us feeling empowered in our obesity, or giving anyone a sense of moral high ground.
This memoir reads as a practice in pure catharsis—an attempt at validating her own traumas and seeing how it latched onto her and changed her perception of herself. It's not about the reader and really whatever they're hoping to get out of it; Roxane is showing us the very experiences that closely reflect those similar to her.
Yes, it is redundant because trauma doesn't just go away. Trauma follows and manifests over and over again, however the brain makes it until the person is able to resolve it. That resolution, though?—sometimes it never shows up. Sometimes, trauma looks like decades of just eating, chatting online, the same list of stupid choices, failed jobs and grades, evictions, severed relationships, and the same relationships that hurt someone the first time the trauma happened.
Years upon years of the same BS, neverending. Always going. And for an obese person—an obese woman of color—Roxane Gay's memoir is chronic and endemic, and it's deeply disturbing and can feel the reader with hopelessness.
Some readers found this book boring because it just repeated the same things over and over. They lost interest. They ask, "What is in this for me? I want my money back! DO NOT READ, EVERYONE."
If this book is anything, it is a practice in empathy for those whose lives have been debilitated and left in Limbo by the foul choices of others—even children, as Roxane Gay had been victim to. And in saying that, I will say that from my perspective, the people complaining about how bored they were and how disappointed that they didn't get any helpful advice or "wisdom" out of this memoir completely failed in that practice.
Welcome to trauma. Welcome to sexual trauma. Welcome to rape. Welcome to PTSD. Welcome to eating disorders. And welcome to all of those things, wrapped up into a life that spent years being unresolved, misunderstood, unnoticed, invalidated, and left to rot—all because anyone could see was that Roxane Gay was fat.
"My warmth was hidden far from anything that could bring hurt because I knew I didn't have the inner scaffolding to endure anymore hurt in those protected places."
"Do my boundaries exist if I don't voice them?"
"The thing about shame is that there are no depths. I have no idea where the bottom of my shame resides."
"There is a price to be paid for visibility and there is even more of a price to be paid when you are hypervisible."
Make sure when you get a copy that you have time to read it through because you will not want to do anything else! LOVE LOVE Roxane Gay! This is her most powerful work to date!
This is a troubling book to read. It's full of angst. The short chapters feel as if each could be a confessional on a shrink's couch. The author shares her innermost wants, needs, feelings. It is so revealing that the reader feels as if they are intruding. The courage it took to write the book is evident. But, what's not so evident but clear is how much the author had to go deep within herself to really understand who she was. I'm assuming she did that alone and not in therapy. She doesn't mention being in therapy (except some counseling when she was in high school).
Given all the revelations in the book, the reader begins to search his or her own soul. In doing that, we might ask ourselves, do we really see others? Do we assume by what we see in other people's appearance (bodies), they are a certain way without knowing that person. Are we subconsciously critical of people who are fat (anorexic, old, handicapped--my additions)?
Ms. Gay helps the reader understand the difficulty she has doing very normal things, like going out to dinner with friends, going to the doctor, using a public restroom, flying in an airplane, sitting behind the steering wheel of a car, going to a movie or the theatre. The list is endless. I can add others: Serving on jury duty, walking on a sidewalk, sitting on a park bench. Those of us in normal-sized bodies take all these things for granted. After having read Hunger, I will never take these things for granted again.
Hunger is a tough read. My hope is the process of writing it helped Ms. Gay deal with her own deep-seated, long-standing traumas. In the meantime, I will never look at an overweight person in the same way. That much I gained from this book.
The book is not a slow read. The chapters are quickly devoured. The sentences short with much repetition. The emotion high.
Top reviews from other countries

Then after she wrote her book ‘Bad Feminism’ there was a photo-shoot for the book promotion. Staring at her full-length body shot she realized that that was her. That was what she looked like. That was the beginning of her coming to peace with herself and the world.
This book is not a sop story. It is not a story that ‘demands to be told and deserves to be read’. It will be impossible not to like RG when one has read the last line of the book and feel with her, sharing her jubilation, enjoying her freedom. It is a book that everyone who is in a cage should read – and who is not in a cage?

The book details her struggles with her body. After a terrifying experience as a teenager she ate as a form of protection which resulted in a lifelong battle with obesity. Her weight remains a powerful identifier.
In the book RG is incredibly honest - I actually struggled to believe that someone was brave enough to say everything she does. Almost everyone struggles with weight at some point and to some degree or another, this means that there will be something in this book that will be familiar. Her reactions and weight issues are more extreme than most people's but she writes in such a frank manner that there is no opportunity (or desire) to judge her choices.
Admittedly this goes against some of the morals of the book but I loved the cover of the edition I read (end of a fork), although it took me a while to work it out!!
I try very hard to be non judgmental and think I can often empathise with people who are different from me, however I found reading this book quite hard. RG made me analyse my attitude to people who are overweight. I came away from this book vowing to work harder on my approach to other people and will also try to influence how others see fat people. I genuinely had no idea how hard it is to do the most simple of tasks (sit on a chair in a restaurant, walk through a door and many others).
This is a difficult read and is uncomfortable but it is meant to be - that reaction is the only way to acknowledge some understanding of the author.


If anyone wants to understand how I feel this is the book to read
