This analogy works really well in that it paints a picture of what’s wrong with anti-feminist thinking. “Those boys treated me like nothing so I became nothing,” (Gay 45).
However, now that she is in the state of mind to be able to write this memoir she is also able to begin to unravel how she felt, and how this trauma has shaped her mind. Through all of this, she also struggles to fully tell her story for the next 25 years and had chosen to keep this trauma a secret from everyone. She looks at her body as a constant physical reminder of the trauma she endured: “The past is written on my body. Like Tiara I also felt as if I could better understand her point of view when Gay went into detail about her trauma. Gay’s trauma plays a very large role in her struggle with her body, and in a way this memoir puts you into her body and makes you feel all of her imperfections.
This novel really helped me to understand Gay’s struggles in ways I never would have imagined. I also found Hunger to be a very well written and powerful memoir. I look forward to hearing from the both of you soon,
HUNGER ROXANE GAY CITATION FULL
Life is full of hardships most things will inevitably get worse before they gets better, until you reach a place in your life to balance out the bad and the semi-good things that come across your life. I find myself admiring her cutthroat approach of warning the reader that not every book will have happy endings. There will be no picture of a thin version of me, my slender body emblazoned across this book’s cover…Mine is not a success story. I liked how straight-forward and honest she was about the content of her memoir, stating that “This is not a weight-loss memoir. You feel like nothing, so you treat yourself like you are nothing because that’s what you feel what you deserve. I don’t know about you guys, but while I’ve never struggled with my weight, I know first hand about what trauma can do and how it can decimate a person until they are nothing. I felt a strong sense of understanding with this topic. So, she turned to food as a comfort, gaining more and more weight because “ I felt undesirable, then I could keep more hurt away” (Gay 15). In the beginning, she opens up with the struggle of dealing with her “wildly undisciplined” body and how she claims she is “trapped in in a cage” (Gay 17) because of the rape she suffered when she was twelve years old. Written by Roxane Gay, the author of Difficult Women, Hunger is a personal and harrowing tale that details her struggle with weight and how it has impacted her childhood, teens, and twenties. Hunger is probably one of the most heart-wrenching and powerful memoirs I have ever read.