I did what I was supposed to, and I think when you're a really good kid, you know how to play that role, and you know how to hide that anything is wrong. I just remember sneaking up to my room and doing my best to hide my clothes and to hide myself for as long as I could, to just try and pull myself together, and I did, because I was a really good kid. To this day, I don't know how I was able to cover up what happened. My 12-year-old self thought, "Oh, I must've asked for this." Not in the way that we say, "She asked for it," but I just thought I deserved it because I was that weak, and that gullible and just that easily manipulated by some random boy I thought I knew. I thought I didn't fight enough, I didn't get away, and so I was complicit in what happened.
I didn't realize that there was a vocabulary to describe the experience, and that it wasn't my fault. I was stunned and I just assumed, "OK, we just had sex." And I didn't realize that there was a thing called rape. I had very little comprehension of what happened to me. On being the victim of a gang rape at age 12 That's why I dragged my heels for so long - the book was actually delayed a year because of that, because I just procrastinated and procrastinated because I was just dreading writing the book, while still feeling like this was a necessary book to write. When I was writing it I was worried about exposing myself like this, and being this honest. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. And she explains why she identified as a lesbian even though she was still attracted to men.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Hunger Subtitle A Memoir of (My) Body Author Roxane Gay The memoir is also about living with contradictions: She describes growing up a daughter of middle-class Haitian immigrants, and not fitting into the narrative of blackness. "And I just thought, 'Well, boys don't like fat girls, so if I'm fat, they won't want me and they won't hurt me again.' But more than that, I really wanted to just be bigger so that I could fight harder." "I grew up in this world where fat phobia is pervasive," she says.
Gay traces her complicated relationship with her weight back to being a victim of sexual assault as a child. Hunger, she writes, is not about wanting to shed 30 or 40 pounds: "This is a book about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight," she explains.
The result is Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. The author of Bad Feminist and Difficult Women says the moment she realized that she would "never want to write about fatness" was the same moment she knew this was the book she needed to write. Roxane Gay has finally written the book that she "wanted to write the least." She teaches English at Purdue University. Her previous books include Bad Feminist, Difficult Women and An Untamed State. Roxane Gay is a novelist and short story writer.
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