Gay writes powerfully, conveying the full range of emotions she felt- palpable is her hurt, anger, fear, guilt, numbness, self-loathing, isolation, and loneliness. But as a woman, with the possibility of it happening to me and/or someone I love and the fact that so many women have had to experience that is horrifying. As a woman not directly affected by sexual assault, I can only go so far in understanding the author’s experience. When Gay was twelve years old, she was ganged raped by a boy she loved and his friends in a cabin in the woods behind her home. I naively figured it would just be about her relationship with food. When I first picked up Hunger, I had no inkling that the book would involve Gay’s sexual assault. Hunger is a memoir of the whys of her body, of sexual assault and rape, trauma, guilt, loneliness, family, victimhood and survivorship, and the lifelong process of healing. Hunger is not only a memoir of physical hunger or the way Roxane Gay ate herself to fatness but why she did. Books end up in our hands at serendipitously perfect moments of our lives sometimes Hunger has been one of those books for me.
