An unflinching take on women and size

“Bad feminist” Roxane Gay has had a prolific year: she published a book of short stories in January and just six months later is releasing a memoir, “Hunger.”

Author of the New York Times bestselling book of essays “Bad Feminist,” Gay is a novelist, cultural critic and professor — who, in addition to being an influential public intellectual, seems like she’s a lot of fun to hang out with based on her enthusiastic and hilarious livetweeting of “The Bachelor.” Her latest work is deeply personal, focusing on her relationship with her body. She shares that it became a “problem” by the time she was a teenager and at her heaviest, she weighed 577 pounds. She writes about being subject to fat camps, considering gastric bypass surgery and enduring judgment from strangers peering into her grocery cart.

Coming from a loving HaitianAmerican family, her size was a source of unending concern — and for many years, she was unable to explain to them why she wasn’t interested in changing it.

In a heart-wrenching chapter, Gay recounts her experience being sexually assaulted by the boy she liked (and several of his friends) at the age of 12. This became the driving force behind transforming her body, making it a “fortress” that would serve as protection from what she saw as the dangers of desirability.

Gay’s willingness to share the difficult details invites readers to go beyond shallow body-positive hashtags and consider what it’s like to live in her body — dealing with everything from cruel online trolls to squatting in a seat on stage for hours because no one considered a small chair couldn’t accommodate all body types. She also delves into the perpetual inadequacy all women are made to feel around their bodies, asking: “What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood.”

It’s her unflinching honesty in a cultish culture of self-acceptance that is such a generous gift.