To be trapped in the cage of one’s body

Roxane Gay’s essayistic memoir looks at how physical self shaped her life

I am terrified of mirrors, and it isn’t just my age. It’s a whole-life thing, a phobia that has, through the years, compressed my posture, lit anxiety flames and (in ways that yet embarrass me) dictated my sense of what might rightly be mine, what I deserve, what can and cannot be taken from me.

We are not our own reflection. But who, in fact, are we?

If that question haunts you as it has eternally haunted me, you will read Roxane Gay’s new memoir, “Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body,” with considerable compassion and care. Gay, a New York Times best-selling author of fiction and nonfiction, has written of how it feels to be trapped, in her words, in the cage of a body. To be trapped, in her case, in a body shaped by the sexual violence she endured when she was 12 years old.

Gay was young, pretty, petite, “good” and loved by her Haitian, well-off family when she was raped by the boy she thought she might love and then, with this boy’s goading, by his friends. There was, Gay tells us, a cabin in the woods. There was pain she could not understand. There were screams no kind person could hear.

There was a bike that she pushed home and a shame she would never escape, secrets she refused to reveal to the family that would have listened, would have loved, would have encircled her pain.

But she could not speak.

By the time Gay is enrolled in an elite boarding school, food has become her best ally, her one escape, her solace:

Gay’s parents cared, offered solutions, paid for medical interventions, but it wasn’t enough to combat the thing that Gay could not yet confide. In “Hunger,” Gay is confiding — exploring the perpetuation of violation, the disposition of the flesh, the ways that we hide and the ways that we are seen.

The book is essayistic, built of clipped personal stories and cultural observations. We find repetitions and stutter steps, a deliberate circling of the truth to get to the truth. There are, in fact, few full-blown scenes; instead we encounter mere touches of landscape, spare indications of weather, no recorded dialogue and few dominating characters, save for the ghost of that rapist boy who is now a man, who is somewhere in this world (Gay has found out where; she has called him and listened to his “hello”).

There are, throughout, tantalizing hints of stories not fully told of a good man named Jon, for example, or the incompatibility of early female lovers, or the life that was lived during a lost year when Gay “did the kinds of things that the good girl I had long pretended to be would never dream