Full and Starving

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay.  Harper Perennial.  306 pp.  $16.99.  ****

I’ll never look at a fat person the same way again.

I use the word fat because that’s the word Roxane Gay uses; in fact she insists on it.  She doesn’t like the euphemisms for her situation.  She tells it like it is.

I’ve read a fair amount of Gay’s social commentary in various publications, mostly the New York Times, and have found her provocative to say the least.  The words shrill and extreme also come to mind.  But she’s fearless in stating her opinions.  I think that attitude comes from the fact that she has to be fearless just to show up in the world every day.  It’s an act of courage just to walk out the door.

Here are some things I didn’t know about her when I read her in the past.  She is a Haitian American who hails from, of all places, Nebraska.  She didn’t grow up in poverty; her father is a civil engineer who builds such things as tunnels and subway lines for a living, and for that reason has had to move his family around frequently.  Because she didn’t want to move to different schools in high school, she applied to boarding school, and attended Phillips Exeter.  She was then admitted to various Ivy League schools and attended Yale, though she didn’t finish there.  She had a period beginning in her college years when she dropped off the face of the earth, hung out in Arizona and various other places with like-minded people she’d found on the Internet.  She has been an avid writer all her life but only in her thirties has she begun to publish nationally.  At this point she is highly regarded, even famous, as a writer.

She stands 6’3”.  At her heaviest, in her late twenties, she once weighed 577 pounds.

She has since lost—as of the writing of this book—roughly 150 pounds, which still leaves her over 400.  But in January of 2018 she finally decided to have a sleeve gastrectomy, and may have lost much more weight since then.  She wrote an article about it, recapitulating many themes from this book.  She seems to write articles at the drop of a hat.

When she was twelve years old, and a normal-sized girl, she was gang raped by a group of boys, including one she had considered her boyfriend.  It was that trauma that fundamentally changed her life.  Her feeling after that event was that she wanted to create a fortress out of her body, so that no one would ever do that to her again.  She especially began eating excessively when she went away to boarding school.  She definitely succeeded in creating that fortress.  She’s been dealing with the aftermath ever since.

Reading this book produced a roller coaster of emotions in me.  I’m ashamed of every time I’ve ever made fun of a fat person, or even looked on one with disdain.  (I’ve had issues with my weight, myself—which I’ll get to in a minute—so often I was projecting.)  I have a sudden new understanding of how difficult life is for a person like Roxane Gay, everything from lying in bed, walking out the door, getting into the car that of course has to be a certain size, going to restaurants, going to the movies, going to the theater, taking a walk with friends, buying clothes.  Things the rest of us take for granted are fraught with difficulty, or impossibility.

The fact is that, at a time when many young people go through torments of all sorts, and Roxane Gay experienced a terrible trauma, she made a decision about her body (I would argue that the decision was largely unconscious) that altered her life in ways she could never have foreseen.  I don’t see her as responsible.

But as a woman friend said when I described the situation to her, “Whether she’s responsible or not, she’s the only one who can do something about it.  Nobody else can help her.”

That’s true too.

My weight change happened when I was seven years old, when my younger brother was born and I apparently decided to comfort myself with food for the love I thought I was losing.  I was a skinny runt at six; at the age of eight I was tied for the fattest kid in the class.  I stayed heavy all through high school—that period when our self-image is largely formed—then suddenly lost forty pounds in my first year at college, when I had to pay for my food in a cafeteria and began to eat more reasonably.  I wrote about that part of my life in articles, also in my fourth novel.  I still have issues with my weight, and need to watch it.  But I never had anything like the magnitude of Gay’s problems.

Roxane Gay is an excellent writer; even when I don’t like what she’s saying, she says it well (in a minor way, this volume is also a memoir of her writing and reading life, which began early and has continued unabated).  She seems to have huge creative energies; just look at a list of her recent publications, in all kinds of different fields, including a comic book.  I’ve never known a fundamentally literary person who also confessed to watching as much TV, not just shows about her problem (like The Biggest Loser and My Six Hundred Pound Life) but also other shows that I consider (without having seen them) borderline trashy; she wrote an article on the Roseanne Barr crisis because she had seen the offending show, and in her acknowledgements for this book says, “Thank you to Law &Order: SVU for always being on television so I can have something familiar in the background as I write.”  (???)

And yet, talk about self-absorbed.  She has a fascinating story here, and tells it well, but her story is also padded—pardon the expression—with endless explorations of her feelings, which are all over the place: she wants to work out but she hates to work out, she wakes up hopeful she’ll have a good day but then she gets discouraged and eats too much and doesn’t exercise.  Any nutritional moron could tell her how to manage her life better (get up at a good time; eat a good breakfast; eat a moderate lunch with some lean protein; do the same for dinner).  She must know these things, but doesn’t do them.  She can’t be a person who entirely lacks will power.  Nobody can produce this much writing without a fair amount of resolve.

And yet I don’t know what it is to have this big a problem.  I don’t, and most of you don’t.  We can’t.  So I don’t know what it’s like to deal with it.  As I’ve said about Charles Bukowski, this kind of person doesn’t usually write a book.  This is a rare look at how this situation feels.

I can’t escape the feeling, which is persistent throughout the book, that her primary problem is low self-esteem.  Her self-esteem was low when she was twelve years old and chose this boyfriend in the first place; she did things with him (she isn’t specific about what) that she knows she shouldn’t have because she felt low self-esteem and wanted to hold on to him.  She didn’t report the rape because she felt guilty and thought she might get in trouble (she was just twelve years old, we have to remember).  She also, when she was much older—in her college dropout period—had various questionable relationships because she was feeling similar low self-esteem, which of course by that time was exacerbated by her weight.  She exhibits the same esteem issues now, when she is talking about herself in the present, even though she’s a famous and highly-regarded writer.

You’re a famous writer, we want to say.  People like and admire you.  What’s the problem?

The problem is some kid yelling “Move your black ass” out a car window while she’s crossing a parking lot.  That was what finally decided her on the surgery.

Yet she’s capable of extremely nervy things.  Publishing this book was nervy, along with a lot of her other writing.  Dropping out of college and out of sight and fleeing to Arizona to be with some guy she’d found on the Internet was nervy (also kind of stupid, but you have to admire the nerve).  She has not only found her former boyfriend—and rapist—on the Internet, she’s called him at work and just breathed into the phone, while he breathed back, as if he knew it was her.  She’s called him more than once.

I can’t help wondering if he’s read this book.  This is what your thoughtless actions at the age of twelve brought about, pal.

Whether he’s read it or not, you should.  I feel sure you’ve never read anything else like it.  It will change the way you view the world.