Strangers shout slurs at her professional acquaintances are shocked when they meet her in person because they cannot imagine that a well-respected author might also be fat doctors refuse to treat her for strep throat without first scolding her about her weight. She describes being covered with bruises after being forced to squeeze into a chair with arms when it is too small for her. In Hunger, Gay describes sitting in an airplane exit row next to a man who becomes convinced that she is unable to “fulfill the responsibilities” of the exit row because of her size. Her body has the right to exist and to be treated with dignity, and that so often she and her body are not treated with dignity is a profound failing on the part of our society. On the other hand, she holds the very reasonable opinion that her body is not made immoral or dangerous or unclean by the fact of its fatness. “I need to tear down some of the walls, and I need to tear down those walls for me and me alone.”

“I no longer need the body fortress I built,” she concludes. She doesn’t like that when she starts to lose weight, she begins to feel unsafe and compulsively eats until the danger has passed. She treats her fatness as a physical expression of her PTSD, which means it’s not something that she can love and accept about herself unconditionally. Gay’s position means she can’t quite conform to either expectation. Feminist women are encouraged to aggressively love their bodies, to understand that one can be healthy at any size and to fight against the culture that teaches women to hate their bodies. Women in general are expected to hate their bodies with a kind of performative smugness, as if the more loudly they announce their loathing of their thighs and their butts and their bellies, the more feminine they will become. There are certain expectations that come with writing about one’s body in public, for women in general and for feminists in particular. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark

Hunger a memoir of my body review