Roxane Gay burst upon my radar with her collection of essays on Feminism titled ‘Bad Feminist’, as well as her novel set in Haiti about a woman kidnapped for ransom, struggling in captivity while her father refuses to pay - ‘An Untamed State’.
Both of the above titles are still on my TBR pile, and I have no doubt I will get to them at some point. For my first interlude with her work, I chose her memoir - ‘Hunger’.
There is one thing you cannot deny about Roxane Gay. And contrary to what she might have you believe in this book, it is not her size. While her trials with excess weight ring a familiar tone in our current environment of buzzwords like the ‘obesity epidemic’ and reality TV sound bites from the likes of ‘The Biggest Loser’, it is her luminous prose, her haunting sentences that are the bedrock of this book.
She manages to both demonise and humanise her weight, painfully paring back the layers of her addiction to food as a coping mechanism to a horrific incident from her childhood. She talks with great honesty about her struggles with being accepted in our thin-obsessed society, her feelings of not measuring up, of such low self esteem that she feels she deserves all the punishment she can get. Through it all, the tone remains honest, and one that evokes empathy, but never pity. That is a hard thing to do as a writer.
The book is divided into several parts, each of which look at a different aspect of her experience with obesity. I found the parts dealing with her struggles with prevailing cultural phenomena to be the most interesting. Her essays on exercise, food and navigating a world as a larger than usual person made for the most interesting and relatable reading.
I have just a couple of criticisms on the whole. First, the book is collection of essays and blogposts that she penned over a number of years, some of which have been published as stand alone pieces in magazines. I felt this disconnectedness come through, which could have been rooted out with some tighter editing.
The second derives from the first, in that after a while, there is a lot of repetition of emotions, opinions, concepts, all of which make the book, and the author’s very valid viewpoint, a trifle exasperating. While she uses repetitive phrasing to great effect in sentence construction, the repetitiveness of her state of mind can descend to a level bordering on carping or whining incessantly about the same situation.
On the whole, this is a book well worth a read, if only to recognise the brutal hypocrisy of our obsession with body image and fat shaming in our present cultural context.