Hunger; A Memoir of (My) Body

Gay, Roxane

ISBN 10: 0062362593 / ISBN 13: 9780062362599

Published by Harper [An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers], New York, N.Y., 2017

About this Item

[8], 306, [6] pages. Minor DJ soiling. 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 deviating act of violence that was a turning point in her life---and brings readers into 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 Gay explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. The author writes that this is a book about her body, about her hunger, and ultimately, this is a book about disappearing and being lost and wanting so very much to be seen and understood. This is a book about learning, however slowly, to allow herself to be seen and understood. The author writes that stories of bodies like hers are ignored or dismissed or derided. Roxane Gay (born October 15, 1974) is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017). Gay is a founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, essays editor for The Rumpus, co-editor of PANK, a nonprofit literary arts collective, and the editor for Gay Mag, which was founded in partnership with Medium. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body was released in June 2017. Throughout, Gay discusses her experience with weight, body image, and building a positive relationship with food, particularly following her experience as a childhood victim of sexual violence. Gay described the book as a testimony of "what it's like to live in a world that tried to discipline unruly bodies." The memoir received wide acclaim, praised by critics as "remarkable. ferociously honest," "arresting and candid," and "intimate and vulnerable." Following her national book tour in support of Hunger, Gay said she found press around the book "to be very challenging, because people just don't know how to talk about fat." In June 2017, Australian website Mamamia published an interview with Gay, revealing numerous details about how they prepared for her visit, which they described as a "logistical nightmare" because of the apparent consequence of her weight. On Twitter, Gay later described these preparations, including questions like "Will she fit into the office lift?" as both "cruel and humiliating". In an interview with The New York Times, Gay stated the controversial event was "helpful, in that I think people get to see, in real time, what fat-phobia looks like and just how careless people can be in considering that fat people deserve dignity. So I suppose it's a useful example of why I wrote the book." Derived from a Kirkus review: A heart-rending debut memoir from the outspoken feminist and essayist. Gay pulls no punches in declaring that her story is devoid of "any powerful insight into what it takes to overcome an unruly body and unruly appetites." Rather than a success story, it depicts the author, at 42, still in the throes of a lifelong struggle with the fallout from a harrowing violation in her youth. The author exposes the personal demons haunting her life-namely weight and trauma-which she deems "the ugliest, weakest, barest parts of me." Much of her inner turmoil sprang from a devastating gang rape at age 12. "I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe," she writes. Gay painfully recalls the "lost years" of her reckless 20s as a time when food, the anonymity of the internet, and creative writing became escapes and balms for loneliness. The author refers to her body as a "cage" in which she has become trapped, but her obesity.

Seller Inventory # 80838

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Hunger; A Memoir of (My) Body
• Publisher: Harper [An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers], New York, N.Y.
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0062362593
• ISBN 13: 9780062362599
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Jay Grabiec (Author photograph)
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Feminism

About this title

Synopsis

The New York Times Bestseller

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

Lambda Literary Award winner

From Roxane Gay, the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist, a memoir in weight about eating healthier, finding a tolerable form of exercise, and exploring what it means to learn, in the middle of your life, how to take care of yourself and how to feed your hunger.

New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, 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 casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties--including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life--and brings readers into 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 tells a story that hasn't yet been told but needs to be.

About the Author

Roxane Gay is the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist; the novel An Untamed State, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize; the New York Times bestselling memoir Hunger; and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, for which she also writes the "Work Friend" column, she has written for Time, McSweeney's, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper's Bazaar, Tin House, and Oxford American, among many other publications. Her work has also been selected for numerous Best anthologies, including Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018 and Best American Mystery Stories 2014. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. In 2018 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and holds the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University's Institute for Women's Leadership.