I did not want anything, or anyone, to touch me.” She chronicles the slow but steady uptick in her weight through her teens, twenties and thirties, to the deep disappointment of her parents, who knew nothing of her secret. “If I was undesirable, I could keep more hurt away… I needed to feel like a fortress, impenetrable.
“I understood, from the way I saw people stare at fat people, from the way I stared at fat people, that too much weight was undesirable,” she writes. As she kept the rape a secret, food became her saviour. “Every body has a history” she writes in the first chapter, which, comprising a scant 21 words, gets directly to the point. “Here, I offer mine.” What follows is a searing examination of the forces that have shaped her body - which, after being gang raped by her boyfriend and several of his friends at age 12, she fought desperately to protect. For me, Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, is one of those books. You aren’t the same person you were when you started reading it, and you won’t be again. Every now and then you read a book that changes you.
