“This is a book,” she writes, “about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight, when you are not obese or morbidly obese but super morbidly obese.” What evolves from there is a bracingly vivid account of how intellect, emotion and physicality speak to each other and work in tireless tandem to not just survive unspeakable hurt, but to create a life worth living and celebrating. Gay, who rose to literary stardom in 2014 with her cheeky, brilliant bestselling collection of essays, “Bad Feminist,” has written powerfully and often for various publications about gender, race, identity, pop culture and personal politics, but “Hunger” is the first book-length piece of writing that focuses explicitly on her weight. Such is the case for Roxane Gay, whose latest work, “Hunger,” is a memoir of her body and how she has lived in and with it since surviving a horrible act of violence. If you are a woman, of any race, it’s nearly impossible not to internalize this mainstream mantra of emaciation as the end goal, but if preempted and perpetuated by sexual assault, a woman’s body can become the towering embodiment of exquisite pain. Because apart from money, thinness is the country’s most valued and desired currency. It solidifies Gay’s place as one of the voices of our age.Like the majority of women in America, I think about nearly every piece of food that I put into my mouth. Each story feels fresh and new, a blanket of snow you both want and don’t want to muddy with a footprint.ĭifficult Women is a book that’s simultaneously engrossing, jarring and creatively inspiring.
The men who usually define the genre, early Hemingway or the Raymond Carvers of the world, have a certain understated prose style, but Gay’s work is as varied as women’s experiences.
The best short fiction usually leaves the reader contemplative or chuckling or sad, but poignancy is what makes Gay’s latest so unforgettable. Rich, poor, black, white, Ivy League, unschooled, they share the common difficulty of simply being a woman. In “Requiem for a Glass Heart,” Gay writes of a man who throws stones for a living but has a glass wife and child, whom he loves deeply despite the difficulties and understandable fear – and yet he’s weak and needs a mistress for “those moments when he does not have to see too much or love too carefully.”įrom surrealism to the heartbreaking realism of pregnancy loss or the violence of rape, Gay’s fiction is as diverse as her female characters. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.