Memoir is a particularly powerful engine for creating that empathy, and this is a particularly potent memoir. I read books for a lot of reasons, but one is to experience the world through someone else’s eyes, to step inside their body (and to step out of mine for a change, because true to this book’s struggles, I have often felt trapped inside my own skin).
I felt the pain, the splitting contradictions, the exhilaration. What I loved about the book was that I felt like I got to live with her, and walk around in her world for some 300 pages. Here was a person in terrible conflict-with her own desires, with a man who wanted to care for her but whom she was nearly asking to harm her, but mostly with her body, her only home in the world. A few years before this book came out, I read a story Roxane posted on her Tumblr about bulimia, and it was a gut punch in the best possible way. Basically, this is the kind of stuff I’ve been thinking about since my body started spinning out of my control in fifth grade, when I hit an early puberty. There was practically a crackle of thunder when I heard the title: Hunger, with all its implications about female appetite, the craving for more, a howling emptiness, deprivation and insatiability. I’ve spent the better part of a lifetime at war with my own body, so when I heard Roxane Gay was writing this book, that shit was on pre-order, fast. Sarah Hepola: I had very different expectations than you. It didn’t take long into the book for her to dash my silly assumptions, and that Hunger is so much more about what defines you in this world, and the power we have (or not) to control that. And I thought the book was primarily about how that had destroyed who she was, and about how she coped through eating, which made her obese (and as she says in the book, at one point “super morbidly obese”), and her life as a result. Having read so much of the press and reviews about it last year, I’d heard about the trauma Gay experienced at the age of 12-she was raped in a remote cabin by a group of boys. Please don’t ask her about it.Īndrew Womack is a founding editor of The Morning News.Īndrew Womack: I’d never read Hunger, but I was well aware what it was about going into it-or at least I thought I was. She lives in Dallas, and she is currently working on a second book. She has been a contributor to The Morning News for more than a decade. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Elle, Glamour, BuzzFeed, Jezebel, and Salon, where she was an editor. Sarah Hepola is the author of the bestselling memoir, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. Now let’s get into it-over to you, Sarah and Andrew! Everyone is excited to read and discuss this book, and so are we. Hunger received, by far, the most votes in our Tournament of Books reader poll. Since Hunger, she’s published Difficult Women (2017) and edited Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture, which was published earlier this week. She also co-wrote the World of Wakanda comic (2016). Hunger, published in 2017, is Gay’s fourth book, after Ayiti (2011), An Untamed State (2014), and Bad Feminist (2014). Today we’re discussing the first half of Hunger by Roxane Gay, through chapter 42. We’ve been talking about doing this for years, and now it’s finally happening.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Welcome, everyone, to our first Rooster nonfiction event. Please note: We receive a cut from purchases made through the book links in this article.
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You can see the full list of nonfiction contenders here. We narrowed that list down to a single genre-memoir-and our readers voted to decide which three books we’d read for this event, and here they are: Hunger by Roxane Gay, Educated by Tara Westover, and Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood. To choose which books we’re reading this month, we asked this year’s ToB readers for suggestions back in March. Welcome to the Rooster Nonfiction Pop-up, brought to you by the organizers of the Tournament of Books.Īll month long we’ll be discussing three recent works of nonfiction.