Girls’ bodies are viewed as objects that are only in existence to serve men. This analogy works really well in that it paints a picture of what’s wrong with anti-feminist thinking. “Those boys treated me like nothing so I became nothing,” (Gay 45). However, now that she is in the state of mind to be able to write this memoir she is also able to begin to unravel how she felt, and how this trauma has shaped her mind. Through all of this, she also struggles to fully tell her story for the next 25 years and had chosen to keep this trauma a secret from everyone. She looks at her body as a constant physical reminder of the trauma she endured: “The past is written on my body. Like Tiara I also felt as if I could better understand her point of view when Gay went into detail about her trauma. Gay’s trauma plays a very large role in her struggle with her body, and in a way this memoir puts you into her body and makes you feel all of her imperfections. This novel really helped me to understand Gay’s struggles in ways I never would have imagined. I also found Hunger to be a very well written and powerful memoir. I look forward to hearing from the both of you soon,
Life is full of hardships most things will inevitably get worse before they gets better, until you reach a place in your life to balance out the bad and the semi-good things that come across your life. I find myself admiring her cutthroat approach of warning the reader that not every book will have happy endings. There will be no picture of a thin version of me, my slender body emblazoned across this book’s cover…Mine is not a success story. I liked how straight-forward and honest she was about the content of her memoir, stating that “This is not a weight-loss memoir. You feel like nothing, so you treat yourself like you are nothing because that’s what you feel what you deserve. I don’t know about you guys, but while I’ve never struggled with my weight, I know first hand about what trauma can do and how it can decimate a person until they are nothing. I felt a strong sense of understanding with this topic. So, she turned to food as a comfort, gaining more and more weight because “ I felt undesirable, then I could keep more hurt away” (Gay 15). In the beginning, she opens up with the struggle of dealing with her “wildly undisciplined” body and how she claims she is “trapped in in a cage” (Gay 17) because of the rape she suffered when she was twelve years old. Written by Roxane Gay, the author of Difficult Women, Hunger is a personal and harrowing tale that details her struggle with weight and how it has impacted her childhood, teens, and twenties. She splits her time between Indiana and Los Angeles.Hunger is probably one of the most heart-wrenching and powerful memoirs I have ever read.
She is a recipient of the PEN Center USA Freedom to Write Award, among other honors. Roxane Gay is a fiction writer and essayist whose most recent works are the best-selling essay collection, Bad Feminist, the memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, and the short story collection Difficult Women. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Times, the Guardian, Bookforum, Time, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. “Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night is hilarious and hard-hitting, and it ripples with energy, insight and searing music. She works as an editor for Little A and Day One, teaches creative writing and co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series. Her second collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonc é, will come out in February of 2017.
Morgan Parker is the author of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, selected by Eileen Myles for the 2013 Gatewood Prize and also a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Join us on Tuesday, January 10th for what is sure to be a wide-ranging and urgent conversation.
Their singular works press us to more carefully consider our understandings of racial and gender identity, movies and magazines, torture and love and joy. Morgan Parker and Roxane Gay are two of our most incisive cultural observers. Lutheran Church of the Reformation (across the street from the Folger Shakespeare Library) Urgently Human: Morgan Parker and Roxane Gay in Conversation