We were Catholic, and very devout Catholics. So the longer I kept the secret to myself, the more dire the consequences became for me, or the more dire I perceived the consequences of revealing my secret became.I was 12, so my fears were really that I was going to get in trouble and that I was going to go to hell, because I had had premarital sex. A secret starts out small sometimes, but then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and it becomes scarier and scarier to imagine ever sharing it with someone.
I did what I was supposed to, and I think when you're a really good kid, you know how to play that role, and you know how to hide that anything is wrong. In Hungers most striking passages, Gay vividly describes her experiences of moving through a bitterly fatphobic world, where fat people are vulnerable to. I just remember sneaking up to my room and doing my best to hide my clothes and to hide myself for as long as I could, to just try and pull myself together, and I did, because I was a really good kid. To this day, I don't know how I was able to cover up what happened. She kept this trauma as a secret for a very long time. This is a book I picked up for nonfiction November and oh man am I glad that I did because it. Let me try to hold this so it doesn’t glare all over the screen. Today i’m going to be doing a book review on hunger by Roxane gay. One day the boy she had a crush on led her into the woods, where they met up with his friends. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body Kindle Edition BY Roxane Gay. It’s the type of story that isn’t usually told, but it should be. The plot (again, STOP reading if you want to be totally surprised): Roxane led a fairly normal and happy life until she was 12. But Roxane Gay affirms that the messages of these stories are incredibly toxic! And that’s why her memoir doesn’t fit into that narrative. And if you are both happy and pretty, then you might be lucky enough to be desired by a man and find the ultimate happiness through a heterosexual relationship that conforms to social norms. It is filled with trauma, pain, disordered body eating, self-loathing.
Since reading Bad Feminist, I so appreciate her strong opinion and unique perspective. Roxane Gay is a wonderful person, writer and twitter user.
If you want to be happy, you need to be thin. This is a difficult book to read, I will not deny that. My Lame Synopsis: The wonderful author Roxane Gay talks about her relationship with food, weight and body image. These stories therefore feed into the larger social narrative that, if you want to be pretty, you need to be thin. If the author of the memoir was overweight, her story often ends with her finding “self-love” and “happiness” by achieving the thin, sexy body that society already wants her to have. Or, to put it more bluntly, they tell a story that embraces traditional values and conformity. They make us feel good partly because they tell a story that we want to hear.
The book is full of snappy soundbites, powerful little nuggets of truthful goodness.We’ve all read them: those gushy, feel-good memoirs that tell a rags-to-riches story. This world and its unwillingness to accept and accommodate me are the problem.” Also good: And violence, of course there is violence: violence against the fat, easily relatable by women with disabilities, as most all of us have been sexually abused at some point in our lives.Īnd it covers the piece about realizing that the problem is not her, as she says, “I recognize that I am not the problem.
That is precisely what happens with disability.īackhanded “compliments” like, “don’t say that about yourself” (similar to, “but I don’t think of you as disabled!”) are delved into, as is sexuality – denying oneself kindness and gentle touch, by dint of thinking ourselves unworthy. It covers the public record piece: that when you are fat, your body becomes fodder for public concern and conversation, people always having your “best interests” at heart. The existence of self-consciousness about space, striving for invisibility in public because of the the presence of so much visibility, so much difference. It covers access: from the helpless feeling of rage for lack of foresight with regard to physical accommodation in chairs, airplane seating, to tables in restaurants (and trying to figure out things ahead of time so that she will know how accessible it is). In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own. The book is loaded with pieces that you can directly apply to experiences with disability. It intersects race and culture pretty consistently.