MEMOIR
Hunger
Roxane Gay
Corsair, $32.99
In Hunger, Roxane Gay, best known for her pop-culture essay collection Bad Feminist, illuminates life in a fat body (specifically, a queer, Haitian-American fat woman's body) in a world structured to exclude and shame her.
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This aspect has dominated Australian media discussion of the book, notably in Mia Freedman's infamously ill-judged podcast interview. But Gay's size, while central to this memoir, is always secondary to the trauma that triggered her childhood weight gain; her size and the rape she ate to escape are inextricably twinned. "The fat created a new body, one that shamed me but made me feel safe, and more than anything, I desperately needed to feel safe."
Hunger is built in a sequence of short, elegiac chapters, thematically and structurally self-contained. Each typically begins with a confession that leads into its subject ("I don't know how to talk about rape and sexual violence when it comes to my own story") and closes with a reflection born of its exploration ("Those boys treated me like nothing so I became nothing"). The effect is a carefully carved, rolling testimonial.
Gay circles her subject, building and returning to the scene of her gang-rape, aged 12, by the boy she thought she loved and his friends. As in a conversational confession, the most private, personally shameful details emerge gradually, as intimacy builds. That Gay continued to see the boy after the rape. That her wardrobe is dominated by "bright, beautiful" clothes she often tries on but never wears, because she feels too visible in them. That she has sobbed from humiliation after enduring too-small chairs on stage or in restaurants. That she has Googled her rapist. These revelations are immaculately controlled.
A recurring theme is the divide between Gay's intellectual awareness that she has no reason to be ashamed – of her assault or her size – and the emotional truth of her shame about both. This is mirrored in other dualities, including the escape she discovers in her hypervisible/invisible fortress-body, and in the world of her imagination, represented by books, writing and theatre sets, where Gay creates her own narratives – and later, on the internet, where she constructs a parallel, disembodied, self.
An ongoing dance between knowledge and denial is represented by the refrain, "I don't know, but I do". She knows the mechanics of how events and patterns in her life unfolded as they did, but still struggles to understand the why of them; the underlying emotional logic that, if definitively decoded, might allow her to fix what was broken, or at least reset her path.
That quest to find answers and escape trauma-embedded patterns (of food, relationships, self-worth) drives the book's cautious revelations and piercingly honest reflection. As a teenager and after, Gay compulsively wrote stories of women broken by sexual trauma. Later, those women made their way into her published fiction, particularly An Untamed State, her psychologically astute (if unevenly characterised) novel about Haitian-American identity and the experience and legacy of sexual violence. And she tentatively explored her own rape in the intermittently brilliant Bad Feminist, embedded in an essay ostensibly about The Hunger Games.
In this context, Hunger reads like the book Gay has long been circling; perhaps the book she had to write to move on. It has that kind of restrained urgency. It's also her best book so far, consolidating her strengths.
As in Bad Feminist, her voice is authentic and unafraid to be contradictory or controversial. While her prose and structure are intricately constructed, she invites the unresolved messiness of her experience into the material of the book, resisting the temptation for neat conclusions or inspirational lessons – though Hunger is genuinely inspiring in a way only nuance can be. Gay's decades-long silence and internalised shame amplified the damage of what was done to her. By taking control of the narrative of her body in this book, she reverses that silence, contributing a valuable complexity to our cultural conversation.
Jo Case is a writer and teacher of memoir.