This article looks through this memoir to find out Roxane Gay's attitude towards these messages in showing how people accept, react, and subvert these messages. Roxane Gay's Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is a memoir of her own body, traumatic journey, and fatness. I wanted to believe them.There is much scholarly research about the impact of popular culture messages regarding fatness on people, but there is limited study on people's attitudes to those fat-shaming messages. They were supposed to know what was best for me. It was, the doctors said, "the only effective therapy for obesity." They were doctors. For $270, I spent a good portion of my day listening to the benefits of having my anatomy drastically altered to lose weight.
I was bigger than five, smaller than two. As I surveyed my surroundings, I did that thing fat people tend to do around other fat peopleI measured myself in relation to their size. There were seven other people in the meeting rooman orientation session for gastric bypass surgerytwo fat guys, a slightly overweight woman and her thin husband, two people in lab coats, and another large woman. I thought, This is how I am spending my summer vacation. Everything was slick, expensive wood, marble. In the clinic, the air was frigid and antiseptic.
Outside, it was hot and muggy and lushly green. My father went with me to Cleveland Clinic. I don't know how I let things get so out of control, but I do. I learned of the number at a Cleveland Clinic in Weston, Florida. That is a staggering number, one I can hardly believe, but at one point, that was the truth of my body. To tell you the story of my body, do I tell you how much I weighed at my heaviest? Do I tell you that number, the shameful truth of it always strangling me? Do I tell you I know I should not consider the truth of my body shameful? Or do I just tell you the truth while holding my breath and awaiting your judgment?Īt my heaviest, I weighed 577 pounds at six feet, three inches tall. This is a book about learning, however slowly, to allow myself to be seen and understood. This is a book about my body, about my hunger, and ultimately, this is a book about disappearing and being lost and wanting so very much, wanting to be seen and understood. This is not a story of triumph, but this is a story that demands to be told and deserves to be heard. People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided.
These are the ugliest, weakest, barest parts of me. Determination, though, has not gotten me very far. I am determined to be more than my bodywhat my body has endured, what my body has become. I am in search of that kind of strength and willpower. I wish I had the kind of strength and willpower to tell you a triumphant story. I've been forced to look at my guiltiest secrets. 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. 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 When I set out to write Hunger, I was certain the words would come easily, the way they usually do. Instead, I have written this book, which has been the most difficult writing experience of my life, one far more challenging than I could have ever imagined. I wish I could write a book about being at peace and loving myself wholly, at any size.
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I wish, so very much, that I could write a book about triumphant weight loss and how I learned how to live more effectively with my demons. I don't have any powerful insight into what it takes to overcome an unruly body and unruly appetites. This is not a book that will offer motivation. 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. The story of my body is not a story of triumph. Here I offer mine with a memoir of my body and my hunger.