Hunger

Hunger is a memoir in which Roxane Gay looks at her life through her body. She describes her childhood, teens and twenties, including an act of violence that, as the book tells it, became a turning point in her young life. She writes that she ate in the hope that being big would keep her safe. The book then moves into the present and the pains and joys of her daily life. It explores desire and denial, self-comfort and self-care, and what it means to be overweight.

Why You Should Read?

• Explore the tension between desire and denial, and between self-comfort and self-care, in one woman's honest account.
• Follow the author from her childhood through her teens and twenties and into the realities of her present life.
• Understand what the author says it means to be overweight when the bigger you are, the less you are seen.
• Experience a deeply personal memoir, written with candor and vulnerability, about the author's own body.

About the Author

Roxane Gay was born on October 15, 1974, and is an American writer, professor, editor and social commentator. Her books include the short story collection Ayiti in 2011, the essay collection Bad Feminist and the novel An Untamed State in 2014, and the short story collection Difficult Women in 2017. She was an assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University for four years, then an associate professor of English at Purdue, where she was tenured. In 2018 she left Purdue to be a visiting professor at Yale. She joined Rutgers in 2022. She also founded Tiny Hardcore Press.