From the New York Times best-selling author of Bad Feminist, a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.

"I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere.... I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe."

In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as "wildly undisciplined", Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past - including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life - and brings listeners along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.

With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved - in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

Listening Length

5 hours and 58 minutes
Author

Roxane Gay
Narrator

Roxane Gay
Audible release date

June 13, 2017
Language

English
Publisher

HarperAudio
ASIN

B01DMXFK6A
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	5 hours and 58 minutes
Author	Roxane Gay
Narrator	Roxane Gay
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	June 13, 2017
Publisher	HarperAudio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B01DMXFK6A
Best Sellers Rank	#11,597 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #28 in Abusive Relationships #48 in Dysfunctional Families (Audible Books & Originals) #63 in Abusive Family Relationships

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"MY NO DID NOT MATTER"-p. 51

Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2022

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Roxane Gay was raped when she was 12.

In reading Roxane's autobiography, I was reminded of another woman's rape words about how she disassociated and felt herself floating above, watching her own rape from the ceiling and these are her words: "I will spend the rest of my life trying to reattach the parts of me that watched from the ceiling that day".

"Coming back" from rape is a journey, and it is usually punctuated with a lot of self-destruction, and Roxane's story has a lot of that. She often runs towards self-destruction because maybe on the other side of that, there is some kind of familiarity, some kind of safety, some version, perhaps twisted, of love. She writes of "needing to be a victim of some kind over and over. That was something familiar, something I understood" (p.236 of my paperback copy).

After sexual assault, it seems less harmful for a girl to inflict damage upon herself rather than having others do it. Sexually abused women will almost always have issues revolving around control because they often feel some of their control was relinquished, stolen, or lost in the abuse. And since sexual abuse involves her body in such a direct way, it is natural that control will be often directed there, at her own body.

In Roxane's novel, An Untamed State, the main character is gang-raped, just like Roxane. Instead of binge-eating, however, she does NOT eat, saying she wants to feel "empty", because if there is nothing there, if she is nothing, then, naturally, there's NOTHING LEFT TO HURT.

Both these approaches--overeating and undereating--are flip sides of the same control coin. And it is a message to her potential perpetrators, and it is this: "I've ruined myself before giving anyone else the chance to EVER AGAIN".

Before he organized his gang rape of Roxane, "Christopher" was someone Roxane wanted love from. She writes on p. 49: "Christopher wanted to use me. I wanted him to love me. I wanted him to fill the loneliness, to ease the ache of being awkward". This is the TRAP girls fall into, desperately wanting love or validation from an incapable boy, and they are often PUSHED into this trap. They are pushed by the media, by fairy tales, and they are often unaware that these guys are playing games.

After the rape, Roxane writes that she became "hyperconscious of how I take up space" (p. 172). This can be a result of sexual assault, regardless of body size. Many sexually assaulted women become hyper-vigilant and PTSD-ing in public because they know how quickly aggression can happen.

Unexamined, sexual assault creates a low bar for future relationships. When Roxane gets older, she often does not wait to get to know someone before jumping into a relationship, which often happens when sexually abused young women start having relationships. She writes of a new relationship that she jumps into that "we did not yet know the worst things about each other" (p. 235).

There should be a WAIT before you really know someone. And usually before a couple has sufficiently waited, they have bonded in "love" or more likely lust, and now feel close. BUT YET they don't really know each other, and, most likely, just know the best versions of each other: the desirable sheen.

There's always something sacred to the sexually assaulted woman, but it usually isn't sex. Roxane writes about the meaning of hugs for her: "A hug means something to me; it is an act of profound intimacy" (p.258).

She also writes of her perceived "inability to overcome my past" (p. 260). For me, seeing how rape is related to blurrier sexually coercive situations, including medical coercion, actually helps, because then rape becomes not an isolated incident, but weaved into the sorry-state of today's sneak-driven society.

Sexual assault is hard to crawl back from and there are some harsh reviewers here, their dismissive attitudes can come abusively close to the perpetrator's energy. Treat Roxane, and all the "Roxanes" with thinner bodies, kindly, respectfully, because that's only the beginning of the way back from abuse for all of society. Because, until that day, and I am not optimistic that that day will come, I will feel as Roxane feels: "angry when I think about how my sexuality has been shaped" (p. 246) AND....

..."weary of all our sad stories--not hearing them, but that we have these stories to tell, and that there are so many" (p.247).

10 people found this helpful

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Junipero

Many 5-star and 1-star ratings missing the point of Hunger

Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2019

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That is my own measly opinion, of course. I think this book left people confused on either end of the spectrum, in different ways. I've read 1-star ratings calling it boring, disappointing, circular, with no light at the end of the tunnel; the memoir of a very unlikable human being who gets nowhere in this book.

Like it's meant to be some kind of fairy tale, or the lesson to be learned is meant to leave the reader feeling accomplished and good. Like wisdom always feels good or something.

Or the 5-star ratings that praise this as though it's this suspenseful and emotionally captivating read—which I personally feel is misleading and such a misrepresentation of why this book exists.

"LOVE IT!!!" feels cheap. Calling this book amazing feels like a lie.

When I started reading Hunger, I knew I was going into a memoir that was probably going to feel very uncomfortable; both in just reading about the real trauma a real person had experienced, and the fact that I have also suffered trauma. I am also obese and have experienced the fear of losing weight for the same reasons the author has and does. I get it and I felt myself bearing down and then a dull sense of disturbance fill my stomach as I got closer to what I knew lived in the pages of this memoir.

I read a life that seemed very similar to mine; at a certain point I even felt a sting of annoyance that someone wrote down my story and got the success that I probably could've had a long time ago. I lived this life, in my own ways—so much of it was terribly familiar to me. Some moments mirrored my own, and some situations I couldn't even begin to imagine myself in.

I'm wondering if those who got nothing out of this really missed the point of what Roxane's memoir is. She's not here to teach us a moral, or to leave us feeling empowered in our obesity, or giving anyone a sense of moral high ground.

This memoir reads as a practice in pure catharsis—an attempt at validating her own traumas and seeing how it latched onto her and changed her perception of herself. It's not about the reader and really whatever they're hoping to get out of it; Roxane is showing us the very experiences that closely reflect those similar to her.

Yes, it is redundant because trauma doesn't just go away. Trauma follows and manifests over and over again, however the brain makes it until the person is able to resolve it. That resolution, though?—sometimes it never shows up. Sometimes, trauma looks like decades of just eating, chatting online, the same list of stupid choices, failed jobs and grades, evictions, severed relationships, and the same relationships that hurt someone the first time the trauma happened.

Years upon years of the same BS, neverending. Always going. And for an obese person—an obese woman of color—Roxane Gay's memoir is chronic and endemic, and it's deeply disturbing and can feel the reader with hopelessness.

Some readers found this book boring because it just repeated the same things over and over. They lost interest. They ask, "What is in this for me? I want my money back! DO NOT READ, EVERYONE."

If this book is anything, it is a practice in empathy for those whose lives have been debilitated and left in Limbo by the foul choices of others—even children, as Roxane Gay had been victim to. And in saying that, I will say that from my perspective, the people complaining about how bored they were and how disappointed that they didn't get any helpful advice or "wisdom" out of this memoir completely failed in that practice.

Welcome to trauma. Welcome to sexual trauma. Welcome to rape. Welcome to PTSD. Welcome to eating disorders. And welcome to all of those things, wrapped up into a life that spent years being unresolved, misunderstood, unnoticed, invalidated, and left to rot—all because anyone could see was that Roxane Gay was fat.

179 people found this helpful

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Courtney & Jim Sadler

Living with trauma

Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2022

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I saw Roxane speak on a PBS NewsHour segment recently, and she sounded like she had some thought-provoking ideas going on in this book. Or maybe, just the idea OF the book was thought-provoking, because she talks about weight and self-esteem, but it's not like most women or men who have sold memoirs about how they have successfully lost weight. Instead, it's an account of living with the trauma of rape.

As a heavy person whose weight has yo-yo-ed my whole life, I obviously can connect with her on feeling visible and invisible simultaneously. Also, while I have never been raped, I do carry trauma. I think anyone with any kind of trauma would find her story relatable. But, if you aren't fat and haven't lived through some kind of trauma, reading this book might still resonate with you.

Many of the chapters read like stand alone essays. For this reason, the memoir is very easy to read. You don't have to recall a lot of obscure facts from previous chapters to progress through the story. Some of the chapters seem redundant, but it's possible that the redundancy underscores how the author grapples with her trauma. (I have heard that feeling grief is like getting hit by ocean waves. Initially, like in a storm, the waves come hard and fast, so you might be triggered with greater frequency. But as the storm passes, as time passes, the waves develop a rolling in and rolling out rhythm. Not as unrelenting, but still there.)

I am looking forward to reading her earlier book Bad Feminist, now that I know about it.

6 people found this helpful

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Shine

Honest account of what it means to be human

Reviewed in India on July 18, 2023

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Fantastic book. Reading Roxanne’s memoir seemed like travelling through my own mind. Her dichotomies are so relatable. I’m not fat but I didn’t feel any different from her. Quite like her we too are prisoners of our own expectations. The book pushes us in a corner to think, really think if we want to curtail our happiness to accommodate unrealistic standards set by a group of people.

aiukubi

Un livre coup de poing

Reviewed in France on May 3, 2023

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Témoignage poignant de la genèse de l’obésité dans une évènement traumatique lors de l’adolescence et de la réalité à affronter à l’âge adulte. Impressionnant et très touchant par le dévoilement de ce qui reste tabou dans la société.

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Cliente de Kindle

Recomiendo ampliamente

Reviewed in Mexico on February 7, 2021

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Roxane Gay se ha convertido en una de mis ensayistas favoritas. Esta memoria de su cuerpo es una gran pieza feminista por el simple hecho de hablar con la verdad.

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valeria scognamiglio

Nice life story, very honest a lost battle anyway toward her demons

Reviewed in Italy on February 5, 2021

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Worth reading. I think at the end everybody would have read " I learn to accept my body, I found my voice and I started losing weight".

Johanna Steinböck

Gripping!

Reviewed in Germany on August 19, 2019

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I read this book within 2 days. It is written in such a raw and painfully honest way that makes it impossibly to stop reading. Roxane Gay shares her very personal story and addresses the topics of sexual abuse, race- and gender-equality, loneliness and obesity in today's society. She gives insight into her most intimate experiences as a black, morbidly obese, and traumatized, but extremely strong and intelligent woman.
I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in topics such as gender equality, human rights, racism, feminism, (sexual) abuse and trauma, eating disorders, society, etc.

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