Hunger

“What you need to know is that my life is split in two, cleaved not so neatly. There is the before and the after. Before I gained weight. After I gained weight. Before I was raped. After I was raped.”

Early in her memoir, Roxane Gay centers her story on a transformative and tragic event that took place when she was 12: rape. This event changed her life and body. In the aftermath of this violent assault at the hands of someone she trusted and his friends, Gay sought bodily transformation through eating. Her current body is a product of this trauma.

“Today, I am a fat woman. I don’t think I am ugly. I don’t hate myself in the way that society would have me hate myself, but I do live in the world. I live in this body in this world, and I hate how the world all too often responds to this body.”

Gay confronts negative stigmas about fat bodies that are designed to demean and dehumanize. Across media, we are bombarded with air-brushed images of ideal bodies that tell us (especially women) that we are not “good enough” if we do not match these images. Gay refuses to accept this message.

“In these pictures, I get older. I smile less. I am still pretty. When I am twelve, I stop wearing skirts or most jewelry or doing anything with my hair, instead wearing it back in a tight bun or ponytail. I am still pretty. A few years after that, I will cut most of my hair off and start wearing oversized men’s clothing. I am less pretty. In these pictures I stare at the camera. I look hollow. I am hollow.”

Gay describes her physical transformation after being raped by taking us back in time through the pages of a family photo album. She sees herself as a well-loved infant and young child alongside her two brothers, encouraging her audience to visualize a content, happy family. Gay appears as a dreamy, girly child—but her image changes as the photographs move forward in time. Gone are the feminine clothes she once loved. She looks unhappy, her body having transformed in response to trauma.