The Prophetic Voice of Roxane Gay

Hunger, by Roxane Gay, is a story that often hasn’t been heard— and likely hasn't often been told.

We are all fed the same narrative about fat people; either it’s the formerly fat person who is now a skinny “success” story or the cropped-out faces of the obesity epidemic on the 6 o’clock news.

This is not Gay’s story.

Gay’s hunger is complicated — she wants comfort and success, intimacy and safety, warmth and self-preservation — proving the complexity of a life often dismissed because of her size. She tells an uncomfortable, messy, and unruly story of being a fat, black woman in the United States. She writes about what it’s like to be afraid of not fitting in — in the world or in a chair. It’s a feeling she describes as being both incredibly visible and utterly invisible at the same time.

Along with the consequences, she tells the story of why she is fat: a brutal rape at 12 years old that left her wanting to make her body a fortress – untouchable.

Hunger is the memoir of Gay’s body — her body before and after being assaulted and her body before and after becoming fat.

In many ways, Hunger is incredibly repetitive. The phrase “I ate and ate and ate” opens many of the short chapters, mimicking both the physical act of Gay’s eating to cope with the rape and the way her overweight body is a daily reminder of pain and the consequences of trauma.

As much as she is very clear that this story was difficult to face, writing Hunger, Gay told Terri Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, that it was a healing experience for her.

I think it can be healing for all of us.

This book is important to me — as a woman and as a woman who has struggled with weight.

Hunger, for me, was a challenge. Gay writes and speaks frankly on the struggles of living as a fat person in the world, not all of which comes from stigma. She wants to become smaller, something I have tried for years not to want because I know my weight struggles are a product of patriarchy and capitalism.

In an episode of This American Life called “Tell Me I’m Fat” — the first I ever heard from Roxane Gay — she divides the fat world into three parts: 20-pounds-overweight fat, “Lane Bryant fat,” and super-morbidly obese fat. Body positive activism, she says, thrives between the first two, which is also where my weight has hovered my whole life.

Hunger does not celebrate fatness like we want to see from Ashley Graham, the first plus-sized supermodel on the cover of Sports Illustrated, or Natalie Hage, another plus-sized model who called out a man on an airplane for fat-shaming her. Her life is not reflected by supermodels. Instead, Gay fights against erasure and dismissal; she fights for her life. I needed to read Hunger to understand, to read the words of a person our culture so desperately wants to get rid of.

Gay is a true prophetic voice. She laments her life, her trauma, and her weight. She doesn’t promise victory but speaks to the pain that so many people feel: victims and survivors of sexual violence, bisexual people, fat people, and lonely people.

It is important to read the words of a fat woman, a woman who is 300 to 400 pounds overweight, and see her as human in a world that so often doesn’t.

Gay’s Hunger may not be a tale of triumph about weight loss, as she writes, “there will be no picture of a thin version of me … standing in one leg of my former, fatter self’s jeans.” But the truth that she has told could lead fat women into liberation and healing.