It’s ultimately a challenging book to describe, and Hunger’s through line is best explained by Gay’s writing itself: “When I was twelve years old I was raped and then I ate and ate and ate to build my body into a fortress. Yet saying that Gay’s memoir, Hunger, recounts her life is an oversimplification of the text. “Here I offer mine with a memoir of my body and my hunger.” What follows are 300 pages of pain, honesty, trauma, joy, loneliness, wisdom, despair and power that chronicle Gay’s life.
“Every body has a story and a history,” Roxane Gay writes in her new book.