Confronting both race and size with raw, brave honesty
To the multiplicities of characteristics and identities ascribed to Roxane Gay — writer, author, New York Times bestseller, bisexual, woman, Black — you can safely add “giver.”
Gay showed up at her sold-out event at the Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church in Toronto on Wednesday evening, and she gave.
She gave herself to the rapt, mostly female audience, with whom she was in turn coquettish and serious, flirtatious (“I’m into ladies”) and vulnerable (“I’ve hit a wall”) at the launch of her book Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.
In some ways it’s what you would expect of a woman with the courage to publicly explore female fatness, a subject whose stigma still stings.
“Today, I am a fat woman. I don’t think I am ugly,” she says in the book, about her six-foot-three frame and a few hundred pounds of weight. “I don’t hate myself in the way society would have me hate myself, but I do live in the world.”
Yet you might also wonder if a woman who has put so much of herself in the book, despite describing herself as a shy, awkward person, would have anything left to give.
She does. She gave her time, telling organizers she would stay as long as it took to sign copies of her book, and the long line that snaked along the aisles for that signature suggested she wasn’t doing it just for the publicity.
Gay also gave something less visible but powerful to her readers, who on Wednesday night came in various shapes and sizes: the permission to not be perfect, and the language with which to navigate those imperfections.
“This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided,” she writes in the beginning.
What she is not writing is a confessional, nor is it a diary; what she is not offering is a book that takes the complexities of size and race and sexuality and reduces them to sound-byte-sized morals such as “love yourself as you are.”
In a world where kindness is labelled as political correctness and cruelty is labelled freedom, she brings brave, raw honesty.
It’s not just the gut-wrenching story of being raped as a 12-year-old, after which, she writes, “I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe.”
It’s also the consequences of having to live with that body.
“I am always uncomfortable or in pain. I don’t remember what it is like to feel good in my body, to feel anything resembling comfort,” she writes.
In the mating game, there is the gaze, the slight smile, the unconscious double take from a stranger, the lingering eye contact and countless other ways people find their attractiveness acknowledged by other men or women.
So much of that is challenged at the intersectionality of race and size.
“People never ask me out. People never approach me,” Gay said. “I wouldn’t know you were hitting on me unless you held up a sign. I’m so used to being ignored. People are not interested in dating women like me. Part of it is dealing with the constant indifference. When people are interested in you, oftentimes they have specific ideas of how you are meant to be sexually. There’s this sense that your pleasure — that you don’t want to be pleasured. That’s not the case!
“Only in my 40s have I been able to articulate I, too, have needs. This body is not a fortress. I need you to touch me like you mean it . . . like I’m a person.”
For victims of any kind of discrimination, baring your soul comes with risks attached, mostly the risk of ridicule from the cruel, the risk of having your trauma dissected and the risk of being disbelieved and challenged in insensitive ways.
Then there is also is the cruelty of unthinkingness. The people who insultingly equate the worth of this intellectual academic to her size, the “mind-blowing” amount of diet and exercise advice she gets, the man who wrote to say “I don’t know if you know this but exercise helps to lose weight,” or the psychiatrist who asked her if she’d heard of bariatric surgery (a chapter deals with that), and a reader from Montreal who offered to buy her something “for a modest $100” if she lost weight by going vegan for three months. (And if she didn’t she would have to give him $150.)
Sometimes heartlessness is best countered with humour, and Gay’s retelling of these responses had the audience in stitches.
“A lot of fat women, and fat men for that matter, feel the need to be funny, to put it out there first,” she said at one point to an audience member who spoke about her own need to be jovial.
“You have to sit down and think, how much of my humour is me . . . and how much of my humour is me trying to overcompensate because I feel this need to overcompensate for something that does not require compensation.” Shree Paradkar tackles issues of race and gender. You can follow her @shreeparadkar.