HungerBy Roxane GayHarper Collins, 2017 

I have been silent about my story in a world where people assume they know the why of my body, or any fat body. And now, I am choosing to no longer be silent.-Roxane Gay, Hunger

On the surface—literally, on the front cover—Roxane Gay’s new book, Hunger, identifies itself as a memoir, and suggests a main theme: her relationship to food, and its role in building the “unruly body” she’s been living in for more than twenty years. She also lays out an explicit purpose early on, quoted in the epigraph above: she’s speaking up in the face of a world that imposes preconceived accounts on her and other fat people about why they are the size they are. In this book Gay writes towards “the why of [her] body,” to set the record straight.And she does just that with bracingly honest accounts of what it actually feels like to live in this world in a fat body—in her case, up to three- or four-hundred pounds “overweight”—and of what eating has done for her beyond providing basic sustenance and nourishment. What makes these accounts so effective are the hyper-detailed descriptions of what could easily be dismissed by a non-fat person as routine activities:

Whenever I am near other people, I try to fold into myself so that my body doesn’t disrupt the space of others. I take this to extremes. I will spend five-hour flights tucked against the window, my arm tucked into the seat belt, as if trying to create absence where there is excessive presence. I walk at the edge of sidewalks. In buildings I hug the walls, I try to walk as quickly as I can when I feel someone behind me so I don’t get in their way, as if I have less of a right to be in the world than anyone else.

Many passages from the book operate in much the same way as this one: bit by bit Gay brings readers into the reality of her world, using granular details to show us a version of the everyday that can often be isolating and always—both physically and emotionally—very painful.And yet. Despite her clear statement of purpose, I kept finding myself pondering what the book is really for, and why she wrote it. Put another way, and borrowing Gay’s own phrase, I wondered about the why of her book. Turning this interrogative into a noun is a peculiar hallmark of Gay’s style, suggesting a desire to find explanations that still retain some of the searching indeterminacy contained in the word “why.” Unlike an explanation or a reason, both of which have a certain finality to them, the why of a thing has a continuous, questioning quality: it can only be attempted and approached, never fully resolved.The why of Gay’s book is multiple and polysemous, just like the why of her body. There’s more than one narrative into which her body and her book might fit. Neither one is a singular record of her history. One of the reasons this book exists is to let readers see (and often feel) what life is like from within a fat body, and that’s extremely valuable—both for people who finally see their own experience reflected in these pages, and also for those who don’t, and therefore probably haven’t considered their own assumptions about that life. But there’s a deeper purpose branching through Gay’s memoir, like a vascular system: this book is a reckoning, in every sense and with all the gravity of the word.As she circles around the why of her body, Gay explores the factors that led to its being what it is: those that come from within (her own experience, personality, and psychology) and from without (people in her social milieu and broad forces in her cultural one). The most obvious and acutely painful of these is an event she describes as a turning point, shaping her life story into a clear “before” and “after,” and fundamentally changing her relationship to her body: at age twelve, she was gang-raped by a boy she thought she loved and a pack of his friends.In retelling this trauma, she holds the boy accountable with her rending details: she recounts how “he pushed me down in front of his laughing friends,” how “he didn’t look at me,” how he “held my wrists, spat on my face.” His culpability is overwhelming, yet Gay refuses to make it a simple case, and even fleetingly entertains the impulse to absolve him: “I told myself, I still tell myself, he was just trying to impress his friends. I tell myself he didn’t mean it.” What she offers instead of an easy verdict is a much more chilling, cognitively dissonant truth: that abusive violence can coexist with and even thrive alongside real attachment, both in the moment and long after. She confronts the fact that her rapist invaded and entangled himself not only in her history but also in the deeper space of her erotic imagination:

Does he know that for years I could not stop what he started? I wonder what he would think if he knew that unless I thought of him I felt nothing at all while having sex, I went through the motions, I was very convincing, and that when I did think of him the pleasure was so intense it was breathtaking.

One can only imagine how difficult the writing of this was. It is difficult to read.At one point in her narration of that day, she describes how the pain triggered in her a powerful desire to become disembodied:

As a sheltered, good Catholic girl, I barely understood what was happening. I did understand the pain, though, the sharpness and the immediacy of it. That pain was inescapable and held me in my body when I wanted to abandon it to those boys and hide myself somewhere safe.

Again, Gay does not exempt herself from her reckoning. She wanted to abandon her body—not only because of the pain to which it was so vulnerable but because she felt it had let her down; it was “a small, weak vessel that betrayed me.” It’s at this moment that Gay begins to divorce her body from her sense of self, a separation she maintains even today, to an extent, as evidenced in the ambivalent parentheses in the book’s subtitle—“A Memoir of (My) Body”—and in her habit throughout of using the demonstrative pronoun “this” rather than the possessive “my” to refer to it. Her body was stolen from her, yet she retains it, an inescapable reminder of past traumas that became easier to blame and punish than to love and treat gently.To live in her body after being raped has meant existing in a kind of liminal state for Gay. “I began eating to change my body,” she explains; she started a multi-year project “to make my body bigger and bigger and bigger and safer,” rescuing herself from the dangers of the male gaze that she knew all too well. And yet, despite her framing of this new relationship with food, and the body that emerged out of it, as something deliberately designed to improve her sense of wellbeing, it also made her feel bad: “I was all self-loathing, for what had happened to me, for what I was doing to my body by gaining so much weight.” This self-loathing was an expression of guilt, because she didn’t only blame her body—she also blamed herself, an impulse that remains: “Even now, I feel guilt not only for what happened, but for how I handled the after, for my silence, for my eating and for what became of my body.”These two repercussions of the rape—Gay’s desire to detach from her body, and her persistent, complex feelings of guilt—inform the style of the book, linking it to genres new and old. Gay is a famous online presence, and she talks candidly about finding a home on the Internet from its earliest days because it allowed her to detach from the material conditions of her world, and simply be herself: “I loved and craved the freedom of being online and being free from my life and my body.” In the details it lays bare the book displays a radical honesty and self-exposure typical of much Internet writing. A particularly discomfiting example comes through in Gay’s description of her feelings in watching TV exposés about women living with eating disorders:

There is something about the gaunt faces and sharply angled bodies of anorexic girls that at once attracts and repulses me. I wonder what holds their bodies together. I envy the way their flesh is stretched taut against their brittle bones. I envy the way their clothes hang listlessly from their bodies, as if they aren’t even being worn but, rather, floating—a veritable vestment halo rewarding their thinness.

In plainly revealing herself to be guilty of the same objectifying gaze others have imposed on her, she exposes the systemic and perverse nature of our culture’s obsession with bodies.The memoir’s many disclosures also place it within the lineage of confessional writing—narratives written in the first-person whose main goal is to purge private information that might be considered transgressive. Confessional writing is of course related to the Catholic practice of making a confession of sins in order to obtain absolution in the eyes of God. The book’s texture of confession takes on new meaning in light of the fact that Gay actually did grow up in a Catholic household. This aspect of her upbringing made her vulnerable to the guilt she is processing here in the book, finally extruding these feelings, articulating them and setting them down on paper.Gay rarely misses an opportunity to admit her own responsibility for “losing control of [her] body”; but there are some figures in this equation who pass through the reckoning comparatively unscathed: namely, her parents. Gay makes it clear that her home life growing up was happy and loving. But it was also one in which behaviors were strictly prescribed to align with her family’s Haitian-Catholic identity—“A Haitian daughter is a good girl. She is respectful, studious, hard-working.” These ideas powerfully shaped her decisions about what to do in the aftermath of being raped. In an interview for The Daily Show, Trevor Noah asked Gay, “You didn’t talk to Mom and Dad—why?” Gay replied, “I was really scared because I believed everything that we learned in Church about premarital sex being a sin and I was absolutely certain that I was going to hell.” In the book, she elaborates: “I couldn’t find a way to overcome my fear of what they might say and do and think of me.”At forty years old, Gay now knows that her parents would have helped her and sought justice for her—something her father unequivocally confirmed after she first went public about the rape in “What We Hunger For,” an essay in her 2014 collection Bad Feminist which, in a number of ways, prefigures this memoir. But at twelve, Gay was plagued with guilt and fear, which caused her to keep silent and turn to food to cope instead of family. When in due course she gained a significant amount of weight, she recounts that “my parents had no idea what to do, but they were incredibly alarmed and immediately began to treat my body as something of a crisis.”Here’s where this book enters its most complex territory, as Gay becomes extremely cautious in describing her parents’ role in the making of her unruly body. It does not take much reading between the lines to discern that even though her parents didn’t trigger the change in her relationship with food, the ways in which they addressed their daughter’s weight gain did not help her recover the path back towards healthier eating—in fact, they caused her to retreat further. As Gay reports, “my family’s constant pressure to lose weight made me stubborn, even though the only person I was really hurting was myself.” Among her parents’ list of solutions was a medically supervised liquid diet whose high protein content resulted in gallstones that put Gay in the hospital in high school. Listen to how she frames this experience: “It turned out the high-protein diet I had been on for the summer had not done my gallbladder any favors.” At the level of syntax, she subtly suppresses the actors behind this ultimately harmful regimen. The same thing happens when she’s telling another anecdote about her parents: after high school, Gay had identified that she needed some time off before starting college. As she says, “I was a mess, barely holding it together, but my request was refused” because “taking a year off between high school and college was not what good girls did.” This time it’s Gay’s use of passive voice that lets her suppress her parents’ agency. Here and elsewhere, the impulse to protect her parents is rooted in the book’s very sentence structure.Through the first two thirds of the book or more, instances of this hesitancy steadily accumulate. And one can’t help but wonder why—in a memoir whose real achievement is charting territory many writers wouldn’t broach—Gay holds back here. In light of her usual candor, these examples stand out. By the end, though, it becomes clear that her oblique treatment of her parents is a deliberate choice rather than a faltering of the book’s blunt honesty. Some of the book’s most moving insights emerge only as it builds toward its conclusion. Describing the experience of being at home, where her body has been treated as “a family problem” for decades, she writes: “I am so much more than hungry when I am home. I am starving. I am an animal. I am desperate to be fed.” At last she brings the deeper meaning of her title to the surface, revealing that she is not only aware, but also entirely in control of, the why of her book.Gay’s summation that she is “so much more than hungry when [she’s] home” is no less subtle than the passive constructions that let her quietly navigate around her parents’ role in building the very body they’ve spent so many years trying to manage. Yet here it’s clear that she knows exactly what she is not naming. Why she is choosing to hold back—because she is protecting her parents, because her feelings of fear and guilt about what they will think of her remain, because she has punished them enough already, with her eating and with long periods of disappearance during her twenties—remains unresolved. As readers, we can only approach the why of this choice.Despite its initial mandate to set the record straight in the eyes of the world, Hunger is not for or about anyone but Gay herself. The book proves to be a record of two adjacent personal narratives: it’s an account of the traumatic violence that her attackers inflicted on her; it’s also an elliptical exploration of the interdependent love and harm she experienced at home in the aftermath. Writing her way through both of these storylines, Gay responds in kind: her account of the rape is as explicit and direct as the act itself, while the clues nestled within it about her family’s reaction to her weight gain are coded, ambivalent and restrained. We learn that the reckoning doesn’t only involve fire and brimstone, but also supplications whispered into the darkness, as Gay finds language to reflect the delicate complexity of family bonds, and the halting difficulty of confronting the truth of her hunger.____Katie Gemmill is a writer and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at Vassar College. Her reviews have appeared in Public Books and Open Letters Monthly.