I listened to Roxane Gay read her own book, Hunger: A Memoir Of (My) Body. It was a soul punch. Maybe I shouldn’t have listened at a time when I was struggling with feelings about my family, or maybe it was the exact right time. Several versions of this review were only appropriate for my therapist. I am fat, and I was always going to be fat unless I either put myself on a constant, punitive diet, or devoted hours and hours of my day […]
What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?
Sometimes when I talk to my students about their writing, I use the metaphor of diving and gymnastics routines, and how they are often (or used to be) graded on a curve of difficulty. So a very hard routine that falls short still get high marks over all. So the student who tried to use the “Mandela Effect” as proof of a multiverse gets a lot of credit trying something audacious, even when it comes up decidedly short. And the student who writes an uninspired […]
“I know that hunger is in the mind and the body and the heart and the soul.”
I have vaguely heard of Roxane Gay through Cannonball and Twitter but I haven’t read Bad Feminist, so Hunger is my first taste of her writing and it was delicious. “The bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.” Roxane Gay is a “woman of size” who, like Lindy West, she uses the word Fat to describe her body. I related a lot to Roxane although I am what she would refer to as “Lane Bryant” fat since I am only about 40 pounds overweight. […]
“My father believes hunger is in the mind. I know differently. I know that hunger is in the mind and the body and the heart and the soul.”
“For so long, I closed myself off from everything and everyone. Terrible things happened and I had to shut down to survive. I was cold, I’ve been told. I often write stories about women who are perceived as cold and resent that perception. I write these women because I know what it’s like to have so much warmth roiling beneath the skin’s surface, ready to be found. I am not cold. I wasn’t ever cold. My warmth was hidden far away from anything that could bring […]