Memoirs are about the author but I have to admit I spent most of Hunger thinking about myself. I don’t like having to say that – I’m a privileged white woman, stories like mine get told all the time and this was a story emphatically not about me and yet chapter after chapter I thought about myself. As something of a Tumblr feminist, Roxane Gay was someone I was culturally aware of, but Hunger was the first of her books that I’ve read. She is an incredibly […]
Seen and Heard
When I started reading this book, I didn’t think I’d relate to so much of it. I knew it was about her body as a “woman of size,” and I knew a bit about Gay’s history as a victim/survivor of sexual violence, but I’m neither of these things, so was surprised. I thought this book would be difficult to read due to the subject matter, but somehow, she accomplishes the impossible and writes an accessible, honest, brave and powerful story of healing. She tells a […]
Memoir about Trauma, Shame, Food, and Body
When she was 12 years old, Roxane Gay was gang-raped by a group of boys from school, one of whom was a boy she had sort of been dating and loved. After that, she set out to eat and eat until her body was a “fortress” that could protect her and couldn’t be hurt. This was interesting for me to read because of the multiple lenses through which I was viewing it. There was the psychologist part of me who had a sort of detached […]
I feel a little lost here, but I still like it
Living in a pretty small, remote town, we make certain to take the kids (yeah…the kids) to a comic book store whenever we are in a bigger city. I walked in to one this winter, and all packaged up just like they knew I was coming, there were the six issues in the limited run World of Wakanda comic series. It hit all the right buttons: Black Panther, so hot right now! Roxane Gay and Yona Harvey, interesting feminist thinker and poet, first two black […]