At its most symphonic, it’s an intellectually rigorous and deeply moving exploration of the ways in which trauma, stories, desire, language and metaphor shape our experiences and construct our reality. Ann Patchett, Commonwealth and Bel CantoĪt its simplest, it’s a memoir about being fat - Gay’s preferred term - in a hostile, fat-phobic world. HUNGER is an amazing achievement in more ways than I can count.
Roxane Gay shows us how to be decent to ourselves, and decent to one another. It turns out that when a wrenching past is confronted with wisdom and bravery, the outcome can be compassion and enlightenment-both for the reader who has lived through this kind of unimaginable pain and for the reader who knows nothing of it.
