There’s lots of things are right about the book. Her writing style is fine and the points she makes are incredibly important. She tells the same stories in different settings.Īgain, there’s nothing wrong with this. This is bound to happen in a 300 page book that talks about only one topic. Her writing style includes a lot of repetition. Roxane Gay tells her stories in such a way that unapologetically calls out the types of things that cause shame to people like herself (which is good) and describes the ways her body makes her feel like she’s trapped in a cage. And not in that “this makes me uncomfortable, so I dislike it” way. You’re not supposed to love this book, but you are supposed to respect and support it. The stories Roxane Gay shares are intense and difficult to read. In fact, it’s a very raw, honest memoir about a topic that is so deeply personal. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with Hunger.
![hunger roxane gay themes hunger roxane gay themes](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58706598e58c627ea1666456/1520989853337-5XO4DFB1K64U7209LF1C/Hunger+Cover+by+Black+%26+Bookish.jpeg)
I feel like rubbish when I don’t enjoy a book that everyone else loves.
![hunger roxane gay themes hunger roxane gay themes](https://findingdelightdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/img_20190923_113526.jpg)
#Hunger roxane gay themes how to#
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. In Hunger, she explores her own past-including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life-and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself. 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 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. Genres: Biography, Feminism, Memoir, Non-Fiction Published by HarperCollins on June 13, 2017 As trauma survivors, we know what it means to be “other” and to have our experiences challenged.Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay This illustrates the disconnect between how we perceive safety in cities and the realities of violence everywhere. Privilege gives us the ability to believe mistruths and play devil’s advocate by turning people’s pain into hypotheticals and debate challenges. People often challenge this story by asking,“Well, weren’t they legitimately worried about your safety in a statistically unsafe neighborhood?” I explain that there was so much violence happening in my own neighborhood (domestic violence, sexual violence, drug abuse, suicide). It was confusing to me, even at 12 years old, why my parents would point out violence there when I had already seen so much in my own neighborhood. I tell this story to illustrate bias – race and class bias, but mostly racial bias because my family knew what it was to be poor.
![hunger roxane gay themes hunger roxane gay themes](https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/hksdigitalbookdisplay/files/hunger_0.png)
They made a point of telling me to be “safe” there. There’s a particular story that I tell in most trainings about how my parents would lock the car doors every time we drove into neighborhoods predominantly occupied by people of color and working class families. I provide trainings to teachers, students and non-profits about diversity and inclusion. It is difficult to remember our true age. All of these feelings (of age) are temporary. We know there has been growth, distance and reflection. And again, we feel 20 years old (or our actual age).
![hunger roxane gay themes hunger roxane gay themes](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/vUpvxN6lFXI7NAtGZwAT23OylLI=/416x0:1749x1333/1080x1080/media/img/mt/2017/06/RoxaneGay3/original.jpg)
We feel suspended in that moments of life-changing trauma that shaped our self-perception, our trust of others and our hope. And with that, there’s this duality of seeing beauty and purity clearly too, yet we feel we’ve lost those things and so we envy it in others. We know so many terrifying truths of the world. Innocence can be taken at such a young age that by the time we are 20 years old, we feel as if we are 100 years old. This captures so much of what trauma survivors can experience. I knew nothing but thought I knew everything.” (Gay, 99) You know when you read something and you are so struck because it sounds exactly like you? As if you could have written it yourself? This quote did it for me: “I was twenty years old and I felt like I was twelve years old and I felt like I was twenty years old and I felt like I was a hundred years old.