Hunger by Roxane Gay

By -
Hunger by Roxane Gay
                Is there anything more personal to us than our body? Is there anything more personal and yet so public as our body? Our size, our skin. These are the things that you notice upon meeting someone. Yet as much as we create and dictate what goes into our bodies, how we choose to show or cover our bodies, we can never dictate what or how others view our bodies. Hunger is the story of Roxane Gay's body. This isn't a memoir about dieting and exercise or finding the true her within her body. It is a memoir of her body, her life and her hunger. It is a memoir about pain. It is a memoir about sexual assault. It is a memoir about space. It is a memoir of how we judge and try to dictate other people's bodies.
                Hunger is an extremely intimate portrait of Roxane Gay by Roxane Gay. Whatever image you may have of her, good or bad, will pale in comparison with how she views herself. This book is raw and painful. It begs you to see the world as she does, and it is uncomfortable and all too telling to recognize society and the way it treats people. How do you fit in society's view? Does this gaze make you comfortable? Why does society feel it has any right to judge anyone's body? The many questions she ask and the questions that hold answers with little or no meaning to those most affected. Gay is super morbidly obese but you don't need to tell her that outright. She already knows because of how society treats her.
                You can never know someone else's story until they bare it all to you. I wasn't prepared for all that Gay exposed about herself. I don't think you can ever be prepared for someone to bare their everything. For me, it's because I know how it feels to bare my inner thoughts, my inner workings and be misunderstood. Hunger doesn't ask for your understanding. There are things you will not understand because you are not in her body. But you need to experience Hunger. You need to experience through her eyes, a life of someone whose pain caused them to hunger and that hunger built walls, walls that take time to come down. I give this 5 out of 5 stars.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steve Johnson

By -
Image
Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steve Johnson Bringing to life the story of a notorious pirate to a modern audience isn’t an easy task. We’re too used to the comfort of easy travel, the mythos of pirates and the commercialized imagery produced by movies and television. Images of Jack Sparrow and Long John Silver have been part of entertainment for so long that the idea of true piracy and all it’s ruthlessness has almost been washed away. It isn’t until you’re able to wash away the false images and submerge yourself into the actual history that you can see piracy for it’s truly brutal nature. It also brings up many questions about governments, laws, corporations, scandal, colonization and other factors that allowed piracy to flourish and exist in the manner that it did for so long. Piracy didn’t exist in a bubble. Enemy of All Mankind takes the story of one pirate, who helped usher in the Golden Age of Piracy, and exa
Read more

Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack

By -
Image
Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack          In my case it is always the image of Odetta that comes to mind when I hear her name. The tall, undeniably Black woman, hair in an afro, guitar in hand. It must be that I simply did not know enough about her life, her struggle, and even her music to convey more than that image. But her image is memorable and her presence something not easily described. This book fills in the gaps in the story of Odetta that I didn’t know. Looking back at my childhood, her most memorable songs are the ones I’ve known most of my life, singing in my school’s chapel along with hundreds of other Black students, the words having meaning that I can only truly comprehend decades later as a Black woman.          Zack takes his time with this biography, letting the readers learn as much about Odetta as we do the time from whence she came. Her migration from Alabama to California, her feelings of coming from a loveless, forced marriage,
Read more

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

By -
Image
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood I’m going to cut right to the chase. This book is well written but we didn’t need it. I expected more. I wanted more and this fell flat. I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale , more than once, and I genuinely enjoyed it. The single narrative of Offred lent itself to the story well and it was genuinely a terrifying society. I watched the first two series of the show and though I have my reservations about it, I still thought it was a good show. It does a great job answering questions that the book could not because of its singular narrative. It filled out the world. This book revolves around three narratives: Aunt Lydia, who we know had a helping hand in stripping women of their sense of self and molded them to be controlled by the men of Gilead; Agnes, raised in Gilead with a Commander as father, privileged and set to marry well; and Daisy, a teenager raised in Canada hating Gilead and the abuses women endured that she’s learned about since she
Read more