” The tale of my torso is not a story of victory ,” Roxane Gay writes in her new memoir, Hunger , which writes June 13.” This is not a weight-loss memoir .”
Instead, Gay — the author of Difficult Women, Bad Feminist and An Untamed State — explores her relationship to her body before and after the sexual violence that would rattle her youth.
Gay discussed her new book Monday on” The Daily Show With Trevor Noah .”
” As a comic, I’ve made a lot of fat gags ,” Noah said in his dialogue with Gay. So he was intent on listening to what Gay told me about her experiences rather than continuing to liken fatness with comedy.
Gay explained that she often feels uncomfortable on aircrafts, at movie theatre and even at her own volume signings, where readers and fans have offered her unsolicited weight-loss advice.
” At the grocery store, people build commentary about what they see in your cart ,” Gay told.” You don’t fit in “the worlds”, oftentimes. The world is not really interested in creating a space for you to fit .”
Gay also shared a narrative from her childhood, when she was gang raped at persons under the age of 12, before she was old enough to understand what happened to her.
” It was so unexpected ,” Gay said.” I just belief,’ I want to be stronger. I want to be bigger .’ … It was a deliberate option .”
Hunger isn’t her first experience with discussing assault and its consequence. For The Rumpus online literary magazine, she wrote about the careless language of sexual violence and other essays based on her experiences.
In Hunger , she writes,” I feed and ate and feed in the hopes that if I constructed myself big, my body would be safe .” This feeling courses throughout the book, which is subtitled A Memoir of( My) Body .
On” The Daily Show ,” describing her motivatings for writing the book, Gay mentioned,” I wanted to tell the story of my torso, because when you’re fat in the world, people have assumptions. They assume you’re stupid . … I think it’s important to show what it’s actually like to live in this world in a fat torso .”
Buy it on Amazon or at your local indie bookstore.
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