Earlier this year, she released a short story collection, Difficult Women, which arrived to excellent reviews. (HarperCollins)Īmericans crave stories of triumph, especially over the body: the defeat of addiction, disease, and above all, obesity.Īll of which makes anticipation high for the June 23 publication of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (HarperCollins $25.99), wherein Gay spends 305 pages explicating those lingering repercussions from that day in the woods. We want to read about discipline, about celebrities that lose the baby weight, about slimming down disguised as catharsis. Gay tells the reader from the onset that we won't find catharsis in the story she’s about to tell. The story of my body is not a story of triumph. There will be no picture of a thin version of me, my slender body emblazoned across this book’s cover, with me standing in one leg of my former, fatter self’s jeans. This is not a book that will offer motivation. I don’t have any powerful insight into what it takes to overcome an unruly body and unruly appetites.
Organized in short bursts of chapters, the narrative takes on a circular pattern, with Gay returning to certain phrases, concepts, events. How, soon after the rape, she began eating as a way to make her body into a fortress, so that what happened would never happen again. This is her refrain underneath it is the core wound of the rape. This is where Gay’s life trajectory was split in two, so brutal that you want to look away. You will remember the times you fat-shamed someone, or were fat-shamed yourself. Some boys destroyed me, and I barely survived it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure another such violation, and so I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away.
Even at that young age, I understood that to be fat was to be undesirable to men, to be beneath my contempt, and I already knew too much about their contempt. This is what most girls are taught - that we should be slender and small. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society.