Genre: Nonfiction
Length: 320 pages
Audiobook Length: 11 hours and 15 minutes
First Published: 2017
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Publisher’s Description
A searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.
“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.”
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. 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 Hunger, she explores her 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.
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.
Quotes from Hunger
What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?
I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere.
It is a powerful lie to equate thinness with self-worth.
My father believes hunger is in the mind. I know differently. I know that hunger is in the mind and the body and the heart and the soul.
The story of my life is wanting, hungering, for what I cannot have or, perhaps, wanting what I dare not allow myself to have.
About Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay is the author of Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, and Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. Visit the author’s website →
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