Although Gay stops short of saying this explicitly, her new weight must also have been a way to make her pain concrete and visible, and yet her parents, fellow students, and teachers fail to notice that she is desperately sad: “They saw me plainly while looking right through me.” Even when, more than twenty years later, her parents finally learn of her rape, from a 2014 review in Time magazine, her mother is evasive: “It was enough to talk around the truth rather than stare it down.” I created a distinct boundary between myself and anyone who dared to approach me.” Gay interprets her weight gain as an attempt to “hide in plain sight” (the phrase recurs often), to conceal her secret. After a horrifying rape at the age of twelve, she became very fat in order to protect herself: “I made myself bigger. The first four chapters start with a variation on “This is the story of my body.” Chapter 2 begins: “The story of my body is not a story of triumph.” Wary of discourses that politicize and often celebrate fat, such as body positivity or queer feminism, Gay presents a sad history of her size. Roxane Gay’s heartfelt new memoir Hunger puts its author’s struggle to write it front and center.
