Hunger by Roxane Gay

 genre: memoir

Roxane Gay's memoir of her body is an intimate glimpse at what it is to live in a "wildly undisciplined" body.  She splays out her trauma to be measured, she is vulnerable and lays at our feet the truth of why she became the woman she is - and what it is to live in this world in an overweight body.

This book is so important.  I have never felt so deeply what it is to live in someone else's body and mind, for all of its messy, beautiful, agonizing and traumatic reality.  Roxane does such an painstaking job of introducing every reader to the truth of fat-shaming, to the underserved nature of people in fat bodies in the medical field, to the absolutely second class life that "people of size" (her term) are expected to live and be grateful for while being openly mocked and ridiculed as well as being subject to a myriad of assumptions about both intelligence and capability.

The writing is superb.  Sublime.  The only reason I am giving it 4.5 stars instead of 5 is because it is a little bit repetitive but truthfully, she may be on to something.  Some things may need to be said twice.  Three times, a HUNDRED times, for those of us who don't need to worry about our body fitting in a space.  We may need to be hit over the head with some of these ideas repeatedly so that we can stop assuming, like our culture tells us, that fatness means something deeper and more morally deviant than it actually means. A body is a vessel, Gay makes that abundantly clear.  A body is a sum of not just choices and genetics but also the things that happen to us that change how we view the world, our place in it and the limits of our body's safety.

Excellent piece of literature.