For a while after that, even into dating my now-husband, I thought this was love. You learn to see love through the eyes of someone you think you love. Where he got this idea (movies, his parents, friends, etc.) I’m not sure but it began to influence my understanding of love as well. I had a high school boyfriend whose ideas of ‘love’ were spending as much time together as possible and not talking to other males. Gay’s struggles to recognize love were relatable to me. I appreciated her honesty because I can’t imagine it’s easy to bare so much of your past pain to the world and to let them judge you. We hear a little about her family and some of her past partners, but it’s mostly about her and her challenges. She doesn’t talk a lot about others because they’re not the focus of her book. She was very open about her past and the hardships she’s had to endure in her life. Gay portrayed herself in a very realistic way. She dealt with a terrible trauma when she was young and her way of coping with it and finding a way to continue in the world may not have been the best choice, but it’s helped her be an incredible writer and a very successful person. More than food, Gay hungered for love and that’s a universal hunger. I hope I continue to be like that going forward. Seeing her side of it and how small things, unintentionally cruel comments, could be so hurtful made me really conscious of how I spoke to everyone this past week. The embarrassment that others have subjected Gay to because of her size is unacceptable. As Gay described some of the ways people reacted to her body, I realized I was guilty of reacting in that way from time to time.
I’m not model-thin in size 00 pants, but the last time someone else called me fat was middle school. As an athlete, I tend to have a smaller body. More than anything, this book made me think.
#Review of hunger roxane gay how to
With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved-in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes. In Hunger, she explores her own past-including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life-and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care.
In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay