We all have our own stories, but the way Roxane writes about her feelings, her relationship with food, with hunger, with other people, and especially her relationship with herself resonates with me. Except, if you are a woman, then you may find yourself transfixed because maybe, just maybe, there are so many similarities in the experience of being a woman that this is the story of your life, too, in its own way. It’s Roxane’s story, her experiences, that grab you in the gut and pull you along on the ride of her life. Eventually, though, the writing style became almost like quiet white noise…nearly soothing, barely audible, and only running in the background. The sentence structure was short, almost choppy at times, and she repeated a lot of things over, and over, and over again. The content was relevant to me but the writing style wasn’t/isn’t a preferred one for me when it comes to reading books. It took a bit of time for this book to really grab me. Roxane Gay’s book Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body While I set the goal this year, I plan to continue this line of reading beyond 2018! I will post about the indigenous authors’ books I’ve been reading in a separate post, after I’ve finished reading The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (I’m about 1/3 of the way through it right now).
The first is to read more books Canadian indigenous authors and the second is to read more books by feminist/body-positive authors. I’ve set two reading goals for myself this year.
#HUNGER ROXANE GAY VK HOW TO#
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.I admit that I’m late to the party when it comes to reading Roxane Gay but that doesn’t make her words any less meaningful to me. 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. 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 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. I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe." I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble.
"I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.