While she and I might be in different BMI classes, I did relate to her memoir. While she has had doctors write her medical diagnoses as primary diagnosis “morbid obesity” and secondary diagnosis, “strep throat,” I have gained and lost the same 30 pounds repeatedly over the years. My body issues are different from Roxane Gay’s. We see Gay as a sheltered child, as an intelligent yet damaged adolescent, and as an accomplished woman haunted by what she calls “the girl in the woods.” Hunger chronicles her complex relationship with her body. At her heaviest, Gay tells us early in the book, she weighed 577 lbs as a twenty-something.
Underestimating the love of her Catholic family, she told no one about her rape but instead turned to food for comfort, and over time, her body became both a fortress and a cage for her. When Roxane Gay was twelve years old, a boy she trusted led her into the woods where he and his friends gang raped her. “What you need to know is that my life is split in two, cleaved not so neatly.
