Next comes a series of dead-end jobs, a return to school and eventual success as a writer.
On one level Hunger is a straight-up memoir, the story of a shy, studious girl, the beloved daughter of Haitian immigrants, who endures a humiliating adolescence, an emotional breakdown in college and the “lost years” of her 20s when “I spent most of my waking hours online, talking to strangers.” It’s the story of a “carefree young girl … who felt safe in her body” until she was “gang-raped by a boy I thought I loved and a group of his friends.” Then she “ate and ate and ate to build my body into a fortress,” which comforted her in the moment but failed to address “this cavern of loneliness inside me that I have spent my whole life trying to fill.” In her powerful, at times harrowing, new memoir, Hunger, Gay explains how she got that way and what it’s like to live “trapped in a cage” of her own making.
At her heaviest, Roxane Gay weighed 577 pounds.
