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Even well-meaning people can be a problem.
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The idea of a “good fat person” is always tied to weight, diet, and exercise. What Gay references is known as “Health at Any Size,” a movement currently gaining attention. are a misguided attempt to reward the behavior of a “good fat person,” who is, in their minds, trying to lose weight rather than simply engaging in healthful behavior. She wants to work out at the gym without people telling her she inspires them to go to the gym (which we fat girls basically hear as “If this fat heifer can exercise, I sure can!”). She desires to make peace with her body, but has never loved it at any size. Second, I was impressed with Gay’s commentary on the nuances of living in a fat body. She also claims that being fat made her more empathetic to the difficulties people with disabilities may have moving in public spaces, like stairs, planes, how fast people are walking, climbing up to a stage, etc., which most of us won’t see with our able bodies. I appreciated that she her story with respect to others.
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She is quick to note that she was “broke,” not “poor” because she could always call her parents and make the money problems go away. When she disappears from home for a year, she points out how broke she was. She notes that although she was gang-raped, many women have worse stories - and too many stories - about sexual assault. First, Gay’s story is so personal, but she never loses the perspectives of other people who have difficult lives. There’s so much to say about Hunger, but I’ll focus on two attributes that impressed me most. But then she disappeared for a year, developed an eating disorder, and engaged in relationships with women because she felt that women couldn’t hurt her like those boys in the cabin had. She went to boarding school and was accepted to an ivy league college. Her family was and is made up of loving, kind, successful, and intelligent people. Gay didn’t tell her parents what happened, living with her sexual assault alone for reasons she can’t explain. No boy wants to have sex with a fat girl, she reasons, but she’ll be tougher if she eats more, too. After, she eats to make her body both stronger and objectionable. When she was 12 and thin, she was gang-raped in a cabin in the woods. Roxane Gay is the daughter of Haitian immigrants. Even Roxane Gay writes that she does not want her fat body to be their inspiration. They’ll feel like they understand fat bodies after reading this memoir and feel sad at the lives fat people live. I argue those will all be thin people who say that. People are going to read this book and call it raw, honest, inspirational, brave. Hunger a long-awaited memoir whose original publication date was pushed back quite a bit (a year, I believe). Many of the chapters start with the same idea, which creates a poetic rhythm to the memoir. It’s effective at showing the difficulty of this book’s contents. Each chapter is written like flash fiction (about 1-4 pages), but it also feels like she gets writing, is ashamed of her story, and then starts again. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay was published on June 13th by Harper Collins.