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After an extended introduction, Gay describes with austerity a violent sexual assault she suffered at the age of 12. She gives a tidy answer: She ate to protect herself after a brutal assault in adolescence. Instead of a straightforward manifesto, Hunger is a discursive take on a small question: How did I become this person? She isn't interested in empowerment, or even a message a reader can take away, but rather making some meaning out of the things that have happened to her. A constant refrain of the book is how difficult just writing about her body was for her. Read more: 'I Love Dick' and the Narcissism of Romantic Obsession Freedman said she wasn't comfortable calling Gay "fat" but was more comfortable with the medical term Gay pokes fun of and dismisses in Hunger, "super morbidly obese." On Hunger's release day, Mamamia, an Australian podcast, posted an interview with Gay with an introduction describing how difficult it was for them to get a sturdy chair and how the host, Mia Freedman, emailed with Gay's publicist to ensure Gay could fit in the elevator. That's not to say that this is ideal text for the Fat Acceptance Movement.
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"They don't know how to hide their shock when they realize that a reasonably successful writer is this overweight," she writes. Late in the book, Gay writes of the dislocation she sees on the faces of people who did not realize that she is fat before booking her for a reading or lecture. I highly urge you to pick this book up.Hunger is, as the subtitle ("A Memoir of (My) Body") implies, a memoir about having a body, and what it means to have one that doesn't fit into the regular bounds of society. Now here I am being redundant, and who am I to rate anything? But seriously, I had so many feelings about this book. It's just such an honest account of her truth, which aligned so well with how I feel pretty regularly. I want to love myself as I am, but I'm ashamed I'm fat, then I'm ashamed for being ashamed. The feelings Gay shares were conflicted, which aligns so well with how I feel as a fat woman. The redundancy wasn't my favorite thing, which resulted in a little bit of a lower rating for me, but in all other realities, the writing was elegant and truthful. I am not here to analyze why things are written how they are written. I'm sure there's a deeper meaning to that, but I am not a literature person - I just like to read and take things as they are for the most part. The timeline jumped back and forth at times, and some pieces within the book seemed redundant. The book, which is broken down into different parts and chapters, felt more like a book of essays to me than a straight-forward memoir.
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And though I'm more of what she would refer to as "Lane Bryant fat," I really resonated with so many of her own insecurities. But Gay's words really truly spoke to me. So, sometimes my own personal doubts feel invalid. And in some instances, I don't feel I'm fat enough to brand myself that way - it's like I'm not fat enough to fit in with other fat folks, but I'm not average enough to be in the mid-size club, either. I am not 577 pounds fat, which Gay reveals she has been at one point.
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I can't imagine how hard it must have been to put some of those things into writing. There is so much heart and passion in the story, and Gay is entirely vulnerable throughout the entire book. But it's also about growing up, breaking free, being Black in a small town, understanding where your privilege lies and where you're underserved. Yes, this book is about being fat (which isn't a curse word - so stop being so uncomfortable when people call themselves fat, thanks). Yet, I felt like I personally wrote some of the chapters within the pages. I wish I could truly put into words how I feel about this book, but I am not that good with words. This is a different story about weight and other intersectionalities that lie within identities.
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I've read that one, and finished it really not feeling great about myself. This isn't a typical "I weighed 200 pounds and hated myself, so I lost the weigh and now I'm wonderfully perfect and happy" memoir. This memoir follows Gay, a queer, Black, fat feminist female, through her lifetime struggles with weight after a horrific incident she experienced as a child.