“They did things I’ve never been able to talk about, and will never be able to talk about,” she writes. The resulting book turned into a portrait of resilience in the aftermath of trauma: When Gay was 12, a boy she adored lured her to a cabin in the woods near her Nebraska home, and he and a group of his friends raped her. “And then I started to think, ‘Well, what would it be like to write a memoir of my body?’” “I’d wanted to write about fat for a while, and I didn’t quite know how,” she says. “I wished I could write that book,” says Gay, 42, a once-obscure academic and fiction writer whose tart takes on social issues and pop-culture built a loyal online audience and helped launch a best-selling 2014 collection of essays, “ Bad Feminist.” There’s no tidy resolution here, no willowy woman on the book jacket holding the waistband of her old pants an arm’s reach from her new body. “ Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body” is no weight-loss memoir, she is quick to explain. Instead, it’s a searing account of the essayist’s lifelong struggle with her weight, which once topped 500 pounds. “The story of my body is not a story of triumph,” Gay writes in the opening pages.
Roxane Gay begins her new book - the hardest she’s ever had to write - by describing what it isn’t. Roxane Gay set out wanting to write about fat, but she “started to think, ‘Well, what would it be like to write a memoir of my body?’ ” (Jay Grabiec)