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If she is holding things back, it’s difficult to imagine what those things could be. If I were him, I would be very, very nervous - which may be the point.) But Gay is ruthless in her self-examination, too. (As she lets on toward the end of the book, she has looked him up and knows where he works. To be sure, she puts the blame for what happened to her where it belongs: on the boys who committed those terrible acts, with a special place of dishonor for the one she once thought she loved. The great strength of Hunger is in Gay’s unflinching look at herself and her life.
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Gay’s struggle with her body has inspired this (rather oddly subtitled) book, which, like its author, succeeds more in some areas than in others. That body, she writes, became “a cage of my own making.” In the wake of that life-altering experience, Gay looked to food as both a source of comfort and a means of rendering her body at once invisible (that is, unattractive) and impenetrable. When Gay was 12 years old, her already unhealthy relationship with a boy her age took a horrific turn: the boy lured her to a cabin in the woods, where he and a group of his friends took turns raping her. Working against her is the reason why she became so heavy to begin with, why she once (if not altogether consciously) wanted to gain weight as much as she now wants to lose it. She has also, as she reveals in Hunger, waged a decades-long, mostly losing battle with her six-foot-three-inch frame, having come, at her heaviest, within spitting distance of six hundred pounds. In short, Gay has become a highly successful writer.
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And, indeed, she is often insightful with regard to sexism as well as racism in popular culture (she is the daughter of prosperous Haitian immigrants). That collection’s appealing premise is that, while Gay may sometimes fall short of her own standards - i.e., while she may occasionally be a bad feminist - she is a feminist nonetheless. Over the past several years, in addition to building an enviable career as a college professor, Gay has amassed a considerable following with her short story collections, Ayiti (2011) and Difficult Women (2017) her novel, An Untamed State (2014) her opinion pieces in The New York Times and - especially - her best-selling book of essays, Bad Feminist (2014).
#Hunger by roxane gay new york times review free#
Free Admission.ROXANE GAY’S Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is, among other things, a demonstration of the human capacity for flying high in some arenas of life while struggling mightily, often unsuccessfully, in others. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition A World of Emotions: Ancient Greece, 700 BC-200 AD, on view at the Onassis Cultural Center New York from March 9 through June 24, 2017. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. Her work has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, and Difficult Women. Gay is one of the most admired writers of her generation, best known for her bracing candor, vulnerability, and power. In Hunger, she explores her past-including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life-and her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.
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In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr, Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. Roxane Gay, the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist, celebrates the release of her latest book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.