She notes how coming to terms with her own size afforded her empathy for people with differently abled bodies.

While Gay is grappling with a painful, first-person story, she gracefully weaves in the sharp commentary that she’s come to be known for. Or I do” and “I do not have an answer to that question, or I do,” imply that Gay understands all too well a broader culture that refuses to accommodate fat bodies and the restraint required to describe the slights she’s experienced within it. Lines like “I do not know why I turned to food. Her unadorned writing style communicates the strain of confronting her weight and her life as they’ve changed. Paradox is a recurrent theme: She uses it to illustrate her complicated efforts to face her body, accept it and what it has endured, and still desire to change it. Hunger builds on Gay’s writing about feminism, women’s bodies, and rape culture to unflinchingly tackle personal experiences. “I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe.” The story of Roxane Gay’s body did not begin with this violation of her innocence, but it was the fracture that would come to define her relationship with food, desire, and denial for decades. “People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. She describes much of her ongoing struggle with weight and trauma as a result of being gang-raped at the age of 12 in the woods near her home in Nebraska. It’s also about so much more: the body she built to shield herself from the contempt of men and her own sense of shame, her complex relationship with parents who took great interest in solving her weight “problem,” and what it has meant for her to be highly visible and yet feel unseen. Hunger is about weight gained and lost and gained-at her heaviest Gay weighed 577 pounds. At a time when there is no shortage of recommendations for women on how to discipline or make peace with their bodies, Roxane Gay’s book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, stands out precisely because she begins it by declaring that she hasn’t overcome her “unruly body and unruly appetites.” Think, confetti showering the winning contestant on a reality show, a newly svelte celebrity swimming inside their “fat ” jeans, or Oprah underscoring in a Weight Watchers ad that she can, in fact, eat bread every day. What is often deemed the most intoxicating part of weight-loss stories is the moment of triumph.

Roxane gay's hunger