Hunger roxane gay read online
Welcome back, Finding Delight Manual Club members! Today is my final post about Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body and I’m turning it over to you. While it is great to read other people’s thoughts about a book and learn a bit more about an author and dive deeper into a subject with extended reading/listening watching … what I love most about guide clubs is that it allows a space for tapping into your own feelings about a book and what it brings up for YOU. Sometimes this can be difficult when reading books by yourself. You read for entertainment and enjoyment, maybe you underline a passage that speaks to you or remark YAS! to a sentence that really rings true. But in a book club? We can dig a petty deeper. So, shall we?
1. Roxane Gay highlights the way society treats obese people in unfair ways. People are quick to voice opinions and create remarks with little regard for compassion. We are constantly bombarded with messaging that being fat cannot be synonymous with creature happy.
Explore your own battle with body image. How has mainstream media had an effect on how you view yourself? The first time I saw Roxane Gay, at a reading in Philadelphia for her book An Untamed State, I felt fancy I’d been pinched. Here was a woman I admired so acutely, in a body I wasn’t expecting, a body that in some ways looked love mine. The intersection of these realizations—that I hadn’t expected her to be fat, that I was so moved and elated that she was, that internalized fatphobia has such incredible power—surprised and disturbed me. As a chubby writer, I have always been aware of how rarely I see other fat writers. As with so many other categories of identity—race, gender, sexual orientation—that lack of visibility is very much at odds with the makeup of the general population. Folks are often surprised when I make this point. They express disbelief that fatness (a word they seem uncomfortable saying, or even alluding to) is any kind of obstacle to being a writer. On the surface, this makes sense: Pages look the same no matter what the author weighs, right? Why should it matter? Yet we see, all the time, the ways it does matter. Last summer, Claudia Herr, then an edit IndieBound, Powells Urban area of Books, iBooks, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Amazon It turns out that when a wrenching past is confronted with wisdom and bravery, the outcome can be compassion and enlightenment—both for the reader who has lived through this kind of unimaginable pain and for the reader who knows nothing of it. Roxane Gay shows us how to be decent to ourselves, and decent to one another. HUNGER is an marvelous achievement in more ways than I can count. At its simplest, it’s a memoir about creature fat — Gay’s preferred term — in a hostile, fat-phobic world. At its most symphonic, it’s an intellectually rigorous and deeply moving exploration of the ways in which trauma, stories, desire, language and metaphor shape our experiences and construct our reality. Wrenching, deeply moving. . . a memoir that’s so fearless, so raw, it feels as if [Gay]’s entrusting you with her soul Gay turns to memoir in this powerful reflection on her childhood traumas…Timely and resonant, you can
Hunger
There are things I yearn to do with my body but cannot. If I am with friends, I cannot maintain up, so I am constantly thinking up excuses to explain why I am walking slower than they are, as if they don’t already realize. Sometimes, they sham not to recognize, and sometimes, it seems like they are genuinely that oblivious to how different bodies shift and take up space as they look back at me and imply we do unachievable things like move to an entertainment park or step a mile up a hill to a stadium or go hiking to an overlook with a great view.
My body is a cage. My body is a cage of my own making. I am still trying to figure my way out of it. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than twenty years.
8
In writing about my body, maybe I should review this flesh, the abundance of it, as a crime scene. I should examine this corporeal effect to settle the cause.
I don’t wish for to think of my body as a crime scene. I don’t need to think of my body as something gone horribly wrong, something that should be cordoned off and examine Ileya
Buy the book
Praise