This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often that not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided.”ĭeeply, painfully personal, Hunger is the account of Gay’s body in particular, which she states is clinically defined as super morbidly obese. However, Gay also explores the realities of having a large body in a world that is not designed to accommodate it.
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Purchasing clothes, sitting in restaurants and movie theaters, traveling in an airplane – these seemingly simple activities are fraught with difficulty and judgement when the person engaging in them has a large body. By widening her memoir beyond herself, Gay expands her discussion from the examination of one body to a discussion of how contemporary culture treats all bodies. Gay’s memoir is broken into sections that broadly trace her growth from childhood to adulthood, the path from a horrific sexual trauma that dissociated her from her body through an adulthood where she struggles to contend with the ramifications of that trauma.
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Gay’s difficulty relating to her own, radically changed body is clear in the language of her memoir, where she repeatedly follows definitive statements about her body with their direct negations. At one point, she tells the reader “I do not know why I turned to food. Or I do.” Within the space of two short sentences, Gay has interrupted herself and contradicted her own deeply personal statement.
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This pattern of assertion and negation is present throughout the memoir, and it echoes Gay’s constantly shifting, evolving understanding of herself and her relationship to her body.