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World Review The New Statesman’s global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. Sign up for The New Statesman’s newsletters Tick the boxes of the newsletters you would like to receive. Despite being a black, bisexual woman who has artfully addressed topics of race, sexuality, and feminism before they became more mainstream, the mere thought of discussing fatness made her uncomfortable. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is Gay’s fifth book and her second work of non-fiction (preceded by her 2014 globally renowned essay collection, Bad Feminist). When I recently met her in London, during her first ever trip to the UK, she discussed possible subjects for her second non-fiction book, and her immediate, deep-seated reluctance to address the issue of weight.
She wanted to be physically large to make herself “repulsive” to men. She describes transforming her body “into what it needed to be – a safe harbour rather than a small, weak vessel that betrayed me”. This, she writes, was the “beginning of the problem” with her body. The story of her rape is one of the first she tells in Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, describing it as the “cleave” in her life – forever split into “before” and “after”.Ī year later, Gay was sent to boarding school in New Hampshire and immediately began to gain weight.
Roxane Gay was gang-raped at the age of 12 by a group of boys from her school in an abandoned cabin in the woods.