Hunger A Memoir Written by Roxane Gay Response

Hunger. In your posts (due by Monday at midnight), you may find that you raise more questions than you answer in these posts. You’ll also find that your classmates’ ideas and interpretations can serve as catalysts for your own analysis later in your own Body Stories.

Your posts should be 300 words minimum and should close-read a passage (or passages) from the memoir and from a theoretical essay (or essays); begin to “put them in conversation” as you did for your Short Analysis Essay.

Here are students replies please write about what the reading of “Hunger” made you feel and create discussion. Please make it like these other two students have done.

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Student #1

Roxanne Gay’s Hunger is a memoir about shame: how that shame manifests and perpetuates when buried, and how, under the right conditions, one may find healing when that shame is unearthed.

As early as age 12, though she had loving and nurturing parents, Roxane experienced some level of shame before the rape. She writes of her relationship with Christopher, “In truth, he treated me terribly and I thought I should be grateful that he bothered to treat me terribly, that he bothered with a girl like me at all. I had no reason to have such low self-esteem at twelve years old” (p. 41). She struggles throughout the book with the reality of having put up with it (p. 41).

Roxane’s hidden shame deepened exponentially after being betrayed by Christopher, and after the gang rape and violence that was done to her, but that she returned to Christopher after the rape, broke her. So began Roxane’s relationship with eating to excess. Roxane became nothingness (p. 45) while subsequently trying to build an impenetrable fortress that no one could breach, that was her body. And she comes to the conclusion early on that she is deserving of such mistreatment because she lacks the discipline that she and society tell her she must have to overcome the unruliness of her body.

Roxane’s painful experiences with shame and self-loathing were compounded by the relentless panoptic gazes of society, strangers, lovers, later, the medical community, and family. Though her family meant well, their concerns, comments, and suggestions regarding Roxane’s weight and health only further burdened her. In addition to shouldering the blame for her situation, she felt as though she was a bad daughter—certainly not the daughter they believed her to be, the good Catholic straight-A student. She had to live a double life to try and please them until she couldn’t.

When Roxane left school and disappeared, though she had totally succumbed to her vices (p.p. 87, 90-91), I saw this as her first attempt to break free from everyone’s expectations and gazes. For a year, she immersed herself in a life that caused a tremendous downward spiral, but she was doing so on her own terms. Additionally, for Roxane, the experience, along with subsequent, mostly dysfunctional relationships throughout her 20s and 30s, may have later helped to shed light revealing what she didn’t want for herself. This may not have been the best way to measure, but at least it was a start. However, knowing intellectually what was harmful to her, and doing what might be more healthy for her, was not so cut-and-dried. She mentions this often throughout the book. These ideas were easier in theory than in practice.

Although she struggled immensely with self-loathing and early on sought to stay permanently invisible, there were saving graces throughout Roxane’s life: relating to the characters in the novels she read, friendships made in theater class and with camp counselors, finding enjoyment in classes, academics, and writing, even getting tattooed. For Roxane, marking her body was a way to reclaim her own skin. “With my tattoos, I get to say, these are choices I make for my body, with full-throated consent…This is how I take my body back” (p. 184). She also learned about trauma and through joining online support groups and by writing, she acquired the necessary language needed to challenge the narratives about size, womanhood, and skin color (among others), and she could reframe these ideas and finally give voice to her shame. At first, she shared experiences anonymously in chats, but eventually, she did so publicly through her writing. By doing so, Roxane was slowly venturing outside of Foucault’s field of constant surveillance, and Siebers’ “invisible center,” despite society continually trying to confine her there.

She also recognized that she needed and deserved love, especially after breaking her foot and facing mortality before going into surgery (p.p. 280-282). She reflects, “I was broken, and then I broke my ankle and was forced to face a lot of things I had long ignored. I was forced to face my body and its frailty. I was forced to stop and take a breath and give a damn about myself” (p. 284). This was a turning point for Roxane.

By the end of her book, after exposing her shame and having shared all her truths through her writing, she is freer and more comfortable in her skin, but she still experiences loneliness, may still sometimes feel trapped in her body, and recognizes that transparency is a process. This can be seen in her word choices when she settles down in quieter places like Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with “so much forest cloaking everything” (p. 293). Or, when she lived in a town in rural Illinois, surrounded by cornfields, near a meadow, “wide and green, bordered by trees” (p. 294). She writes, “At the end of every summer, a farmer threshed the meadow and hauled the hay away” (p. 294). She continues, “I stood on my balcony and watched as he worked, methodically, making the land useful” (p. 294).

Maybe these enclosed living environments are akin to the fortress that is her body, in which she is still entitled to take refuge, when needed. And the farmer threshing the hay may represent the slow, tedious physical and emotional ongoing work of tearing down the walls to expose something she feels can inevitably be of use to her and others (all of chapter 86).

“I’ve decided that I will not allow my body to dictate my existence, at least, not entirely. I will not hide from the world,” she exclaims (p. 296). However difficult, Roxane is doing her best to be present, to look for happiness within her self, and to not hide (p. 296).

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Student #2

Roxanne Gay’s moving memoir Hunger presents an intimate story – akin to how our classmate Candy has discussed – rooted in shame, namely how the social gaze of others cultivated a dominantly hostile and dismissive attitude towards her own body and subsequently, her own self.

Early on in her memoir, after being raped, Gay admits that she resorted to food as a source of relief – of safety. Gay writes, “I was swallowing my secrets and making my body expand and explode. I found ways to hide in plain sight, to keep feeding a hunger that could never be satisfied – the hunger to stop hurting. I made myself bigger. I made myself safer” (p. 61). Hunger, in Gay’s lived experiences, transcended the physical. Her pain, a result of being violated by Christian and the other young boys, cultivated a deep psychological hunger, one that longed for safety in any way, shape or form. Resultantly, Gay’s increased desire to eat more resulted in the development of a “larger body,” one which – in the social gaze – became synonymous with an imperfect body, one deemed disgusting and not worthy of social acknowledgement. And to add fuel to the fire, in American society, to be fat is often to be viewed as a choice rather than as a result of external influences. And society’s answers to losing weight? Workout! Get on a diet! While toxic, these responses to Gay’s bodily figure help in portraying the dominant ideology that a body must meet certain societal standards, which have been perpetuated both by male supremacy in addition to the contemporary medical institutions. As Seibers writes, “…modern culture feels the urgent need to perfect the body. Whether medical scientists are working on a cure for the common cold or the elimination of all disease, a cure for cancer, or the banishment of death, a cure for HIV/AIDS or control of the genetic code, their preposterous and yet rarely questioned goal is to give everyone a perfect body.”

While Siebers doesn’t necessarily speak on weight as a characteristic of the “perfect body,” I find that his passage still applies. Gay experiences shame as a result of her being raped by Christian and was only heightened by her “imperfect” body, one with which she wrestles constantly throughout the early chapters of the memoir. I have yet to conclude Gay’s memoir in its entirety, but I hope – in the face of the social gaze and societal standards of beauty – that she can find peace amidst the pain she and her body have experienced.

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