‘A cage of my own making’
Roxane Gay shares intimate struggles in memoir Hunger
TORONTO — Roxane Gay knew the story she felt compelled to share would also be the toughest: her deeply personal struggles of life in a larger body.
“The book that I wanted to do least was to write a book about fatness — and that’s when I knew that it was probably the book I needed to write the most,” the celebrated cultural critic and professor said during a recent interview in Toronto. In her powerful new memoir
Hunger (Harper), Gay reveals how a horrific childhood sexual assault led her to turn to food as a means of comfort.
Gay was 12 years old when she was gang-raped by a boy she thought she loved and a group of his friends at a cabin in the woods.
“Those boys treated me like nothing,” she wrote, “so I became nothing.”
Gay said she had a healthy attitude toward food until she started gaining weight. But when she went away to boarding school at age 13, she lost “any semblance of control” over what she put into her body and indulged in an “orgy of food.”
At her heaviest, Gay, who stands 6-3, weighed 577 pounds. She described her body as “a cage of my own making.”
Gay wrote of being “extraordinarily visible but invisible” living as a fuller-figured woman. Her heightened sense of awareness about her own body has made her more empathetic toward others who may also feel relegated to the shadows.
In Hunger, she recalled a particularly illuminating event, which took place while sitting opposite Gloria Steinem as the feminist icon promoted her book in Chicago. Gay recalled hearing “some rumbling in the audience” as several individuals wanted a sign-language interpreter to move for a better view of the two writers.
“That was a really eye-opening moment for me because, I mean, they weren’t bad people. But it was just such a selfish moment to be sitting there and being able to hear and then wanting the sign-language interpreter to move when the people that needed to see her needed to see her — otherwise they wouldn’t get anything from the conversation.”
Gay also explores the broader impact of society’s obsession with weight, and addresses the need to expand the definitions of beauty to embrace a vast array of body shapes and backgrounds.
“That’s why intersectionality matters,” said Gay. “It’s an unwieldy word for a very simple thing — which is that people are never just one thing.
“We’re never just women, we’re never just people of colour, we’re never just queer or straight or whatever else you might be. We are the sum of parts, and it’s important to consider all of those parts.”