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Scott Fitzgerald is born (from Bookworm Norm, 2017) September 24, 2019
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#The book hunger by roxane gay how to#
“Food offered comfort when I needed to be comforted and did not know how to ask for what I needed from those who loved me.” So today she feels trapped by a strategy that she has, if you’ll pardon the expression, outgrown. On the other hand, Gay herself does not seem open to communicating with her parents they first learned about her childhood rape from reading a review of Bad Feminist in Time magazine. Her parents in particular, wealthy Haitian immigrants and strict Catholics, seem to be distant figures more willing to help with advice than emotional understanding. Her size has also affected her relationships with family, friends and lovers (of both sexes, she’s openly bisexual) who are constantly trying to fix her “problem.” She enumerates all of the indignities someone of her size faces – having to buy two airline seats, for example, struggling to find clothes that fit her, worrying about chairs in restaurants and not being able to go to the theatre because she can’t fit in the seats. She does not accept or embrace her “super morbid obesity” – she thinks of her body as a “cage” that she is imprisoned in. Hers is not another voice in the “fat acceptance” movement. Gay wishes that she could be smaller, but for various reasons it hasn’t happened. “People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions,” she writes.”They think they know the why of my body. An important element of Gay’s story is her gang rape at age 12, something she kept secret for decades. Gay tracks her physical and emotional state from childhood to the present. “I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe,” she says. The subtitle of the book is ‘A Memoir of (My) Body’. She began eating compulsively after that to deliberately make herself unattractive, as a coping mechanism. I read her collection of essays, Bad Feminist, a couple of years ago and in it she wrote for the first time about having been gang raped at the age of twelve. She stands six foot three inches tall and at her heaviest she weighed 577 pounds. Gay is a literature professor, a respected novelist, essayist and a sought-after cultural commentator. I just finished Roxane Gay’s searingly honest memoir, Hunger, about her battle with her “unruly body and unruly appetites.”