The memoir is also about living with contradictions: She describes growing up a daughter of middle-class Haitian immigrants, and not fitting into the narrative of blackness. 'And I just thought, 'Well, boys don't like fat girls, so if I'm fat, they won't want me and they won't hurt me again.' But more than that, I really wanted to just be bigger so that I could fight harder.' 'I grew up in this world where fat phobia is pervasive,' she says. Gay traces her complicated relationship with her weight back to being a victim of sexual assault as a child. Hunger, she writes, is not about wanting to shed 30 or 40 pounds: 'This is a book about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight,' she explains.
The result is Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. The author of Bad Feminist and Difficult Women says the moment she realized that she would 'never want to write about fatness' was the same moment she knew this was the book she needed to write. Roxane Gay has finally written the book that she 'wanted to write the least.' She teaches English at Purdue University. Her previous books include Bad Feminist, Difficult Women and An Untamed State. Roxane Gay is a novelist and short story writer.
