Review of reviews: Books

Book of the week

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

(Harper, $26)

Addiction memoirs often make the addict appear glamorous, but “that doesn’t happen with obesity,” said Jim Higgins in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Roxane Gay’s “remarkably brave” new memoir is about the body she has lived with since early adolescence, a body that at one point grew to 577 pounds and that across three decades has caused her great shame and earned her endless lectures and insults. A best-selling essayist with a devoted internet following, Gay refuses here to deliver the “crisis-andconversion” tale the world expects, the kind that ends with a dieting marathon. Instead, she tells a coming-of-age story in which her weight is both persistent burden and shelter— a direct response to being gangraped at 12. “I needed to feel like a fortress,” she writes. “I did not want anything or anyone to touch me.”

“Hunger is Gay at her most lacerating and probing,” said Renée Graham in The Boston Globe. Describing her rapists, who lured 12-year-old Gay into a cabin in the Nebraska woods, she calls them boys who were “not yet men but knew, already, how to do the damage of men.” She told no one about the crime for 25 years, but gained 120 pounds in high school and began living with society’s judgment and contempt. Still, “if this seems like so much guiltinducing drudgery, it’s not.” Gay “wields a dagger-sharp wit,” and she uses it to take down pop culture’s oppressive obsession with weight when she’s not aiming arrows at herself. At one point, she pokes Oprah Winfrey for saying that inside every overweight woman is the woman she knows she can be. Gay thinks, “I ate that thin woman and she was delicious but unsatisfying.”

Gay, in fact, can be too relentlessly selfcritical, said Rosalind Bentley in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. By the middle of the book, “I hadn’t become insentient to her pain,” but “I had become weary of the self-flagellation.” Eventually, she describes developing a healthier relationship with food and arriving at a tentative peace with a body she’s sure will never meet the standards of beauty of a society whose fat shaming still infuriates her. Other authors have written Fat Girl memoirs, but Gay’s stands “a quantum apart,” said Karen Long in Newsday. “Hunger has the power to disturb and to linger.” ■