Size became ‘a cage of my own making’
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 says. “I’ve often found that the things that I find scariest as a writer generally end up being the most intellectually satisfying — and so I just went with it.”
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-foot-3, weighed 577 pounds. She described her body as “a cage of my own making.”
Laying bare the intimate details of her physical and emotional challenges with weight has created a kinship between Gay and her readers — one that caught her off-guard.
“I’ve gotten a lot of notes from women and men who have seen parts of themselves in the narrative and who can relate in some form or fashion, which is always a surprising but interesting thing to have with your writing,” says Gay, 42, author of acclaimed 2014 essay collection Bad Feminist.
“The level of detail with which people tell me their stories is sometimes like: ‘Wow, you’re trusting me with quite a lot.’ ”
Gay wrote of being “extraordinarily visible but invisible” 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 signlanguage 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.
I’ve often found that the things that I find scariest as a writer generally end up being the most intellectually satisfying — and so I just went with it.