Hunger roxane gay read online

Welcome back, Finding Delight Book 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 book clubs is that it allows a cosmos 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 guide club? We can dig a small deeper. So, shall we?

1. Roxane Queer highlights the way society treats overweight people in unfair ways. People are quick to voice opinions and craft remarks with short-lived regard for sympathy. We are constantly bombarded with messaging that being heavy cannot be synonymous with being happy.

Explore your own battle with body image. How has mainstream media had an effect on how you view yourself?

Ileya

The first time I saw Roxane Gay, at a reading in Philadelphia for her book An Untamed State, I felt enjoy 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 like mine. The intersection of these realizations—that I hadn’t expected her to be fat, that I was so moved and excited 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 noticeability 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 synonyms 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 writer weighs, right? Why should it matter?

Yet we watch, all the time, the ways it does matter. Last summer, Claudia Herr, then an edit

Hunger


  There are things I want to carry out with my body but cannot. If I am with friends, I cannot keep up, so I am constantly thinking up excuses to explain why I am walking slower than they are, as if they don’t already know. Sometimes, they fake not to know, and sometimes, it seems favor they are genuinely that oblivious to how diverse bodies move and grab up space as they look back at me and suggest we perform impossible things like proceed to an amusement park or walk a mile up a hill to a stadium or depart 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 contain been trying to figure a way out of it for more than twenty years.

  8

  In writing about my body, maybe I should study this flesh, the abundance of it, as a crime scene. I should examine this corporeal effect to judge the cause.

  I don’t want to consider of my body as a crime scene. I don’t want to ponder of my body as something gone horribly erroneous, something that should be cordoned off and examine

Buy the book

IndieBound, Powell&#;s City of Books, iBooks, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Amazon

Praise

It turns out that when a wrenching past is confronted with wisdom and bravery, the outcome can be caring 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 Lgbtq+ shows us how to be decent to ourselves, and decent to one another. HUNGER is an amazing achievement in more ways than I can count.

Ann Patchett, Commonwealth and Bel Canto

At its simplest, it’s a memoir about being 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.

New York Times

Wrenching, deeply moving. . . a memoir that’s so brave, so raw, it feels as if [Gay]’s entrusting you with her soul

Seattle Times

Gay turns to memoir in this powerful reflection on her childhood traumas…Timely and resonant, you can