Book Review: Hunger By Roxane Gay (4/5)

Roxane Gay takes up space. In your brain, on the page, on Twitter — and she wants you to know it too. In the Bad Feminist essayist’s newest book Hunger, Gay tackles her own complicities and insecurities, tracing her life as a black fat queer woman through the events that have unfolded over the course of her life. From the beginning, it’s clear that Gay isn’t going to give us the traditional tale of redemption or the traditional happy ending, which she tells the reader within the first couple of pages. Instead, she is focused on making the reader understand what the story is not. “This is not a story of triumph,” Gay says from page one. “Mine is not a success story. Mine is, simply, a true story.” Her starting paragraphs set the tone for the rest of the memoir, both in their honesty and in their structure. Gay is definitely an essayist at heart and not your typical narrative writer; nor is her exploration of her own life typical. She lays the foundation of the book in her childhood innocence, her rape, and everything afterwards. In this way she effectively lays out the real effect of trauma — it is not simply the act that is impactful, but everything that comes afterwards. Throughout the book, the reader is brought to understand Gay’s understanding of the real reason behind her weight gain and loss, her chaotic twenties, and the events that brought her moments of clarity in between. The book’s resolution is not necessarily a happy ending, but a process of coming to a bittersweet understanding and almost acceptance. Hunger is a memoir framed around the body and the…