To this day, I don't know how I was able to cover up what happened. It’s the type of story that isn’t usually told, but it should be. But Roxane Gay affirms that the messages of these stories are incredibly toxic! And that’s why her memoir doesn’t fit into that narrative.

And if you are both happy and pretty, then you might be lucky enough to be desired by a man and find the ultimate happiness through a heterosexual relationship that conforms to social norms. If you want to be happy, you need to be thin.

These stories therefore feed into the larger social narrative that, if you want to be pretty, you need to be thin. If the author of the memoir was overweight, her story often ends with her finding “self-love” and “happiness” by achieving the thin, sexy body that society already wants her to have. Or, to put it more bluntly, they tell a story that embraces traditional values and conformity. They make us feel good partly because they tell a story that we want to hear.

Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.72 x 5.We’ve all read them: those gushy, feel-good memoirs that tell a rags-to-riches story.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper 1st edition (June 13, 2017).

Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and tells a story that hasn’t yet been told but needs to be. With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. In Hunger, she casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties-including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life-and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life. 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. New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. 6/11: Summer Pop Up Market and Book Club Fairįrom Roxane Gay, the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist, a memoir in weight about eating healthier, finding a tolerable form of exercise, and exploring what it means to learn, in the middle of your life, how to take care of yourself and how to feed your hunger.

Hunger gay book