The hunger pains
Roxane Gay’s candid memoir about life as a fat woman reveals the extent to which the larger you are, the less you are seen, writes Carina Chocano
The mind is inherently embodied,” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote in 1999. “Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.” These were the three major findings of cognitive science that put to rest “more than two millennia of a priori philosophical speculation” about the mind’s relationship to the body. Not only is there no split but, remarkably, the mind “arises from the nature of our brains, bodies and bodily experience.” Cartesian dualism is officially dead, felled by the theory of embodied cognition, which holds that “the structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment.”
Roxane Gay’s luminous new memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, is a profound example of this theory in praxis. An uncompromising look at the specific, often paradoxical details of her embodiment, the book examines the experience of living in her body in the world as through a kaleidoscope from every angle, turning it over and over into myriad new possible shapes. At its simplest, it’s a memoir about being fat – Gay’s preferred term – in a hostile, fat-phobic world. At its most symphonic, it’s an intellectually rigorous and deeply moving exploration of the ways in which trauma, stories, desire, language and metaphor shape our experiences and construct our reality.
The daughter of prosperous Haitian immigrants (an engineer and a homemaker), Gay moved often growing up, but thought of Omaha as her home. Her sheltered childhood came to an end when, at the age of 12, she was gang-raped by a group of boys, one of whom she knew and had a crush on. Because she’d willingly gone with the boy to a cabin in the woods, and because even after the assault she continued to see the boy – who was handsome and popular like the boys in the Sweet Valley High books she loved – Gay kept it a secret from her parents and internalised the shame. She ate to protect herself, to make herself less attractive, to comfort herself, to punish herself. She writes: “I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe.” In her late 20s, at 6 feet 3 inches tall, she reached, at her heaviest, 577 pounds. She reveals the number gingerly, aware of the prurience it will evoke, but also to confront “the truth” of her body.
Unlike most stories about weight, hers is not a story of triumph over her “unruly” body, easily summed up with a picture of her standing in one leg of her old pants, having prevailed against “the problem.” It’s not a howto, or even a how. It is, however, the story of a different kind of triumph, a narrative one. Gay wrestles her story from the world’s judgment and misrecognition and sets off on a recursive, spiraling journey to rewrite herself. The story burrows in on itself while expanding exponentially. She grapples with exposure, with the price of silence, with the fact that her story is horrifying yet banal. How to look at her flesh? she asks. Should she regard it “as a crime scene,” or should she see herself “as the victim of the crime” that took place in her body? Is she a victim or a survivor? Everything that happened to her body can be reframed, reclaimed or rejected. It dawns on you that the writing itself is a reclaiming, an act of rehumanisation. It reads like a memoir of her victorious, if not frictionless, journey back to herself, back into her body, from the splitting off of trauma. Is the responsibility for her body really hers alone?
Woven into this story of trauma are threads of astute criticism that lay bare the problematic assumptions, the endless hypocrisies of a culture that is toxic to women. Much of it centers on the idea of hunger, both as emotional need and as motivating desire. As a young girl Gay was overwhelmed with shame. As an adult she understands that she was victimised, but the shame remains, reinforced by the stories our culture tells about it. Gossip magazines feature post-diet celebrities, “flaunting” their weight loss. Jilted lovers show off their “revenge bodies.” Oprah hauls “wheelbarrows of fat” on stage. In a culture where the desirability of women’s bodies is constantly monitored and reported on, where rape is normalised and excused, where fat is seen as a contagious disease and a drag on the system, stories about hunger contain us and shame us. They police our desire. They keep us locked in the delusion that our bodies are our biggest problem.
Gay’s body, she writes, sometimes feels like a cage. She can see out, see what she wants. But her desire is not validated or acknowledged, because she lacks (the world says) self-denial and discipline. The hunger that has defined her life as a woman has symbolised both lack and desire. It’s been a self-annihilating impulse in a culture that extracts a price from women for being visible, for taking up space, for having a voice, but also a force. With this book, she reclaims the body, reclaims the right to be seen and heard for who she (really) is. Fiction, she tells her students, stems from desire, from hunger. And hunger is creative power. It lets her be the things she is not allowed to be – big, loud, visible, free. ■
She ate to protect herself, to make herself less attractive, to comfort herself, to punish herself