Hunger is perhaps one of the most honest texts ever published by a woman in a body of size. There are truths in this book many others will know dearly. There are truths in this book many will be hearing for the first time. (Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer and Khloe Kardashian have all cashed in on chubby-girl personas, despite not being plus-size.) Gay may not consider her story a "success," but claiming the space in which to write fiercely about her body, when so few narratives in pop culture's body-acceptance arena are genuine – earned – is powerful. Too often, body-acceptance discourse is driven by celebrities who aren't actually overweight. "This is a book about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight," she says. Gay makes it clear that this memoir is not about the experience of being moderately heavy. I've been forced to look at my guiltiest secrets. And what could be easier to write about than the body I have lived in for more than forty years? But I soon realized I was not only writing a memoir of my body I was forcing myself to look at what my body has endured, the weight I gained, and how hard it has been to both live with and lose that weight. A bestselling author and contributing writer at The New York Times, Gay calls the process of finishing Hunger the most difficult writing endeavour of her life: "I was certain the words would come easily, the way they usually do. "Mine is not a success story," Gay writes early on, squashing any preconceived assumptions that this memoir is about weight loss, as so many body stories are. To read these experiences consolidated in one place, written so clear-heartedly, is to understand the exhaustion of living in a body under surveillance. "Sometimes I have a flashback to the humiliation of that evening and I shudder." She writes of going to the doctor only if she really has to in order to spare herself the shaming of the indignities involved in air travel of the unsolicited evaluations from strangers. "I was filled with self-loathing of an intense degree for the next several days," she writes. Gay and the other authors were expected to climb up, despite the sheer inaccessibility of the expectation. Gay tells the story of giving a reading at the Housing Works bookstore in New York. In Roxane Gay's new memoir, Hunger, these intrusions happen every day, verbally or otherwise. The cartoon itself is not malicious, but the meaning is all too real: If your body is "the bad kind," others will tell you, even if – like that meddling avocado, its confused little grimace the proverbial facial gesture of condescending ungraciousness – they haven't been asked.
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Because the fat in human bodies is a stigma, or a punchline, or an asset, depending on whether it pleases or repulses the eye of the beholder. One of them is crying and the other is chasing after it, apologetically pleading via speech bubble "I said you're the good kind of fat!" Because the fat in avocados is monounsaturated. Two anthropomorphic avocado halves are in a fight. That is a very generous act.A few weeks ago, I came across a cartoon that enraged me:
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She writes about rape and its aftermath with such wounded, intelligent anger that a crime we are used to seeing primarily in sensational form on television becomes our reality as well as hers.
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Gay writes of extreme obesity with such candor and energetic annoyance that her frustration with herself and with the world around her attains universality. On the contrary, the movement of her thought and prose is open and expansive. Gay describes herself as 'self-obsessed,' but she has written a memoir that never slides into narcissism. Hunger is a walk in Gay’s shoes, a record of the private pain of the endless and endlessly mundane inconvenience of travel through a world set up for people who move through the world differently than you do. There is no successful therapy or diet or life-affirming meditation practice in Hunger. Nor does she indulge in the promise of improvement or even inspiration. Confessional memoirs often seem to spring from a hope that when a writer shares a painful experience, readers will not only be informed, they will be inspired to overcome their own pain.