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    Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
    Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
    Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
    Ebook256 pages3 hours

    Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

    By Roxane Gay

    4/5

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    • Body Image

    • Self-Acceptance

    • Self-Discovery

    • Love

    • Personal Growth

    • Fish Out of Water

    • Coming of Age

    • Star-Crossed Lovers

    • Dark & Troubled Past

    • Overcoming Adversity

    • Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl

    • Chosen One

    • Found Family

    • Prophecy

    • Mentor Figure

    • Identity

    • Shame

    • Family

    • Relationships

    • Self-Perception

    About this ebook

    From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.

    “I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.”

    In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.

    With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 13, 2017
    ISBN9780062362605
    Author

    Roxane Gay

    ROXANE GAY is the author of several bestselling books, including Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, the essay collection Bad Feminist, the novel An Untamed State, the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti, and the graphic novel The Sacrifice of Darkness. She is also the author of World of Wakanda, for Marvel, and the editor of Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture and The Selected Works of Audre Lorde. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and has launched the Audacious Book Club and a newsletter, The Audacity.

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    Reviews for Hunger

    4/5

    1,359 ratings111 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a compelling memoir that offers a deep insight into the issues of trauma, mental health, and body image. The author's honest and compassionate approach resonates with readers, conveying a nuanced understanding of what it means to be traumatized, overweight, and a woman in America. The powerful prose, wit, and hope in the face of adversity make this memoir a must-read for everyone, regardless of their personal experiences."

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
       This memoir is raw and honest. It continues to confirm for the that various addictions - drugs, alcohol, sex, eating disorders - are all the same tune sung in different keys.
    • 4/5
      This is a very raw memoir that begins when the author was 12 years old and gang-raped which led her to over-eat and eventually become morbidly obese, her body becoming a boundary and her protection from the outside world. In the memoir, the author describes her experience as a large person in a culture where we constantly fat-shame everyone who is more than a size zero. For the reader, it was an interesting, thought-provoking read.
    • 4/5
      Some memoir, some personal essay - Gay has a great voice that calms even through heartbreaking story.
    • 5/5
      This book was great. So many passages that really resonated with me. Roxane's experiences were similar yet very different to mine. I think so many people can read her book and feel that there is someone out there who understands them.

      So many times I start a memoir that is recommended, only to find it is not as good as I hoped. This book is every bit as good as I hoped and even better than I expected.
    • 5/5
      Wow! This memoir is fascinating. Roxane Gay tells her story in a way that I feel like I know her. She somehow takes the tragedies in her life and tells how she felt at the time and how if affects her now. She is an amazing writer and an even more amazing person. I'm glad she had the courage to tell her story. She narrates the audiobook which makes it very personal.
    • 5/5
      I cannot assess this book objectively. Roxane Gay speaks what's in my heart and mind despite the differences in our biographies or particular trajectories from childhood trauma to adult living. Beyond the emotional resonance, we are the same age and found refuge in so many of the same things (theater! the 90s internet! love of being in love!) that it is so easy to feel as if I know her like a friend, if I were able to be a friend to myself.
    • 4/5
      Beautiful and brutal and honest.
    • 4/5
      Prepare to be sad. There are funny and triumphant moments here, of course, but this book is primarily about vulnerability, heartbreak, and how they can mark a body for life. Roxane Gay was violated, traumatized, isolated and misunderstood, but also significantly heartbroken at that moment of childhood-stepping-into-womanhood when we probably wound most easily. In response, she embarked on a campaign to become too big to hurt. Gay reminds the reader that her story is unique, not intended as a universal narrative or a balm for those with similar experiences. As someone who has tried in many ways to be the opposite of big for most of my life, I can only say that I, too, found my reflection in Roxane.
    • 5/5
      What an intense journey; this left me gutted and without a lot to say even though my mind is churning.
    • 5/5
      My Takeaway

      "This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided. People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. They think they know the why of my body. They do not."
      Roxane Gay, Hunger

      Hunger was raw, unfiltered, explicit, heartbreaking and extremely personal. There are a few explicit parts that were hard to read because they were so graphic, still, Gay's writing was phenomenal and incredibly honest. In this memoir, Gay articulately expressed her struggles with her weight, body, and self-image after being gang-raped at the age of 12. I can't praise Gay enough for being so brave and honest. Hunger definitely changed some of the misconceptions and views I held about overweight individuals. I highly recommend this book - especially to those who struggle with their body image. I had the pleasure and honor of meeting Roxane this past June. She was extremely funny, witty and quite shy!
    • 5/5
      Roxane Gay's Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is devastating, both as a personal memoir and as a critique of social attitudes towards overweight women. She traces her struggle with fat to time when, at age 12, she was gang raped by a boy she thought she was in love with and his friends. Gay believe she started packing on weight as a defense mechanism, an effort to make her unattractive to the opposite sex, but when the epithet "slut" continued to be thrown at her, she asked her parents to let her enroll in a private school. Here, she hoped that she could create a new identity, and she did: the Fat Girl. Thus began years of moving from one place to another, one relationship to another, in hopes of finding acceptance and--contradictorily--invisibility. As a six-foot tall black lesbian feminist who weighed over 575 pounds, this hasn't been an easy quest, and it still continues. In addition to her personal story, Gay explores social biases and pressure against obesity (especially for women), from reality shows like "The Biggest Loser," "Extreme Weight Loss," and "My 600-lb. Life," to celebrity endorsements of weight loss regimens like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers, to the reactions of strangers, ranging from stares of disgust to mocking insults. As someone who has struggled with weight for most of my life, I empathized with her claim that a fat person is never able to relax in public, to remove herself from her body and the feeling (or awareness?) that others are constantly seeing and judging her. I, too, have had those moments of self-hatred, of not daring to share the arm rest on a plane, of being self-conscious about what was in my grocery cart or on my plate in a restaurant. Ultimately, Gay comes to no conclusions. Hers is not a happy before-and-after weight loss story, nor is it a journey towards fat acceptance. If anything, it seeks to expose our society's focus on body image and the damage that can be done when we can't see the person because we allow ourselves to be blinded by the surface. And it chronicles Gay's own continuing efforts to rely on her strengths and positive qualities despite what others see.
    • 5/5
      Hunger is so much more than a book about weight. Roxane Gay explains what her body went through, what her mind went through, and how that lead to her being here today. She is very vulnerable and I feel like it is a different side of her when compared to her voice in Bad Feminist, which I loved, but this one is more personal and pretty heartbreaking at times.
    • 5/5
      Best for: Those who enjoy amazing writing, searing honesty, and vulnerability.

      In a nutshell: Roxane Gay shares a memoir of her life, framed through her relationship with her body.

      Line that sticks with me: There are too many to include all of them. But here’s one: “But the pain of a tattoo is something to which you have to surrender because once you’ve started, you cannot really go back or you’ll be left with something not only permanent but unfinished. I enjoy the irrevocability of that circumstance.” (p 186)

      Why I chose it: It’s Roxane Gay. Come on.

      Review: I was so anxious to read this that instead of visiting my regular bookstore I stopped at chain store in the middle of the work day in a town I happened to be passing through because I wanted to be able to start reading it at the first possible opportunity. Which turned out to be waiting in line at a coffee shop before a meeting. A meeting I was nearly late to because the writing and story are so compelling that I did not want to put it down.

      Dr. Gay (Professor Gay? She has a PhD, so I want to acknowledge that properly) has written a memoir that is unlike any other I’ve read. It feels almost like poetry, as the 300 pages are split into nearly 90 chapters. Some chapters are but a paragraph long; others span multiple pages. The subject matter is challenging, but Prof. Gay’s language is not. As she provides some detail of her rape at a young age, the rape that she describes as a turning point that caused her to build up a physical distance between herself and others through weight gain, she manages to use language that is extremely uncomfortable and horrifying yet possible to read through.

      The book focuses on her relationship with her body and what it is like to be in this world that does not value fat people, but it isn’t a laundry list of the challenges she faces. Yes, there are chapters about the frustrations she deals with when traveling, but Prof. Gay finds a way to discuss it that simultaneously points out all the ways people unintentionally — and intentionally — shun, punish, or otherwise seek to harm fat bodies AND remind us all that this is her experience. She isn’t a headless fat person on the evening news; she is a person who lives in this body, who deserves to be seen and respected. And we as a society — and individuals — fail at this. Hard. And often.

      And people suffer because of it.

      As Prof. Gay points out in the beginning, this is not a ‘before’ and ‘after’ story in the sense that you’ll see her holding up her old clothes and her new, skinny body. She is still a very fat woman. And she is still valuable, and worth love, respect, and basic human decency. She won’t be more of a person if she weighs less.

      This is a book you should read. We live in a world where it is so easy to deny the humanity of those who are not like us. Even some of the progressive folks I know, who would never dare mock someone who is a different race, religion, or sexual orientation than themselves, still make shitty comments about fat people. Still used fat as an insult. Still take joy in seeing other people gain weight. And that’s really fucking shitty.

      I hope you read this book.
    • 5/5
      Hunger is so much more than a book about weight. Roxane Gay explains what her body went through, what her mind went through, and how that lead to her being here today. She is very vulnerable and I feel like it is a different side of her when compared to her voice in Bad Feminist, which I loved, but this one is more personal and pretty heartbreaking at times.
    • 4/5
      Beautifully narrated. Like listening to an old friend.
    • 5/5
      This book evoked so many feelings in me and had me on the cusp of tears more than once. I've never read anything like it. Everyone should read this book.
    • 5/5
      What an intense journey; this left me gutted and without a lot to say even though my mind is churning.
    • 4/5
      Roxane Gay is an amazingly intelligent and articulate feminist author and teacher, yet she comes across in this book as a very damaged, very fragile, very obsessed woman. Probably the first thing most people notice about Gay is her weight - at one time more than 500 pounds, now somewhere in the 200s or 300s. She's big. The fact that she's so many things other than big seems to constantly escape her mind. She was gang raped by friends of her boyfriend at the age of 12 and now, more than 30 years later keeps obsessing about that rape and blames it for her hunger. It's good to show the world that rape has long lasting consequences, but must it ruin one's life forever? Gay is intelligent and articulate, as I mentioned but also respected and loved not just by the general public but personally loved by friends, family and romantic partners. Yet she is massively masochistic. She describes a very bad fracture that she experienced and states that sometimes when a person is in pain only more, even severe pain can lead them to change and heal. She thinks her compound fracture lead her to heal. I wonder how much more damage she will need to inflict on herself before she can stop. I found this a very disturbing book, and I don't see how the writing of it was beneficial to women in general or to her personally. I think maybe it was just another way for her to hurt herself.
    • 5/5
      This book was haunting and inspiring at the same time. I have been waiting to write a review of it because I am afraid my words won't do it justice. Roxane Gay is a true force of not only words but life. This book holds up a mirror to existence and dares the reader to not only live harder but look deeper at yourself and decide how you choose to exist in the world.
      I actually had to keep rereading it sentence by sentence because there was so much written that I thought had come from me and I had to remember that no, I had not written this amazing work.
    • 4/5
      Today I'm going to attempt to form some coherent thoughts about my experience reading Roxane Gay's newest book entitled Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. Some of you might have already had this book on your radar because of the huge amount of press that it got right after its release. This is an extremely personal account of Roxane's experiences as an obese woman in our society (which is obsessed with being skinny as you know). However, it's less a commentary on that than a self-exploration of her relationship with food and her body. You might recognize Gay's name from my review of her frank assessment of feminism and how she identifies herself (not just as a feminist but all-around human). I thought that she had pushed the envelope with her openness and willingness to 'go there' with that book but reading Hunger was a whole new experience. For one thing, this isn't a book about the trials and tribulations of being overweight in America and how she's planning on using this book as a tool to get her life back on track. No, this is a cathartic exercise in purging some of the darkness that she has had buried inside for too long. (I'm trying to not give away too much because her writing of the events of her life is kinda the whole point of the book.) This book will make you rethink the way that you look at your own body and how you make assumptions about other people based on their bodies. It is not meant to be preachy or shaming. It's one woman opening up about a horrific experience in her life and how that changed her forever. I think this is the kind of book that everyone should read because it opens your eyes to yourself, to others, and makes you think. 9/10 definitely recommend
    • 5/5
      One of the bravest book I have ever read. Roxane Gay lays it out all the pain and ugliness she has endured.
    • 4/5
      This is not an easy read to stomach, but it does have a powerful message about finding your voice.
    • 5/5
      Hard and painful and funny and relatable and true and honest and real. Read it.
    • 5/5
      I put off reading this book for a week, for no reason other than the title told me nothing. I ordered it some time ago from my library, probably from some news review and then forgot what it was about. Today I started it,....and finished it. The gang-rape pulled me in, as I had been raped several times at her ages, and the more I read, the more I could feel and empathize with her emotional pain. Her ways of dealing with it were a bit different than mine, but it doesn't matter. Each of us deal with trauma in our own way; hers was to eat her way to oblivion. "If I'm fat enough, no one will bother me" was her mantra to hide behind fat. Ms Gay is a great writer and able to tap into the emotions and write about them in a way that hopefully others can understand. She answers questions that go unanswered: "Why didn't you stop other abuses?" and "why abuse yourself; others did that." It doesn't matter what her behaviors were at the time, or now. Her "fat" body is a shaming thing in today's society. I want to throw up when I see the Kardashian's flaunting their nakes butts and everything else, when we who have been shamed know this isn't reality. It is who is on the inside that counts, and it took Ms. Gay a long time to figure out that inside she is a lovely person, growing into someone with self-worth. What the boys took from her can't be returned nor forgotten, nor forgiven, but she has become an inspiration to me and to many. God bless her for her candid memoir and God bless her lovely family, who stood by her unconditionally.
    • 5/5
      Both specifically intimate and universally cathartic, this is a memoir everyone and anyone should read – not just because of its compassionate, incisive approach to the discussion of trauma and mental health generally, but also because of the personal experiences it conveys in a powerful cadence with halting, resonant prose that is not without wit and is certainly never without hope in the face of adversity. The tight focus of the memoir is the spyglass through which author Roxane Gay conveys a firsthand and nuanced understanding of what it means to be traumatized, to be fat, to be in recovery, and to be a woman (and more specifically, a black woman) in America – an understanding so few bother to comprehend all at once but which you will not leave this book in ignorance of.
    • 5/5
      This Is Very Good, Maybe This Can Help You
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    • 3/5
      It was emotionally touching. I enjoyed the memoir, but I think it tended to wander around and around toward the end. I used the audio book along with the e-book which made it go faster, but a great deal of this memoir could have been better organized in chronological order to reduce both the length and the rambling. Otherwise, I enjoyed the author sharing her story which I am sure was a painful way to heal.
    • 5/5
      Had been wanting to read this book for a long time, and although I've heard Roxane talk about it in interviews and podcasts, and am used to her writing through her substak newstetter, newspaper columns and essays, this book is a visceral piece of writing.
    • 5/5
      I have been reading Roxane Gay since she started writing her work advice column for the New York Times; I have been wanting to read her books for about that long but Hunger is the first I have read. It is a devastating account of her life and the pain she has endured. It is also extraordinarily well written and discrete while being brutally honest.
    • 4/5
      I listened to this very well read/produced audiobook.

      Gay's story is a nearly unbearable tale of being gang-raped as a child and what happened to her in the aftermath, mainly her becoming super morbidly obese. It is relentless in its close examination of the choices she has made, the things she had no control over, longing and loathing.

      Gay is a brilliant writer, and this book is an important addition to the literature of "the body."

    Book preview

    Hunger - Roxane Gay

    I

    1

    Every body has a story and a history. Here I offer mine with a memoir of my body and my hunger.

    2

    The story of my body is not a story of triumph. This is not a weight-loss memoir. There will be no picture of a thin version of me, my slender body emblazoned across this book’s cover, with me standing in one leg of my former, fatter self’s jeans. This is not a book that will offer motivation. I don’t have any powerful insight into what it takes to overcome an unruly body and unruly appetites. Mine is not a success story. Mine is, simply, a true story.

    I wish, so very much, that I could write a book about triumphant weight loss and how I learned how to live more effectively with my demons. I wish I could write a book about being at peace and loving myself wholly, at any size. Instead, I have written this book, which has been the most difficult writing experience of my life, one far more challenging than I could have ever imagined. When I set out to write Hunger, I was certain the words would come easily, the way they usually do. And what could be easier to write about than the body I have lived in for more than forty years? But I soon realized I was not only writing a memoir of my body; I was forcing myself to look at what my body has endured, the weight I gained, and how hard it has been to both live with and lose that weight. I’ve been forced to look at my guiltiest secrets. I’ve cut myself wide open. I am exposed. That is not comfortable. That is not easy.

    I wish I had the kind of strength and willpower to tell you a triumphant story. I am in search of that kind of strength and willpower. I am determined to be more than my body—what my body has endured, what my body has become. Determination, though, has not gotten me very far.

    Writing this book is a confession. These are the ugliest, weakest, barest parts of me. This is my truth. This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided. People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. They think they know the why of my body. They do not. This is not a story of triumph, but this is a story that demands to be told and deserves to be heard.

    This is a book about my body, about my hunger, and ultimately, this is a book about disappearing and being lost and wanting so very much, wanting to be seen and understood. This is a book about learning, however slowly, to allow myself to be seen and understood.

    3

    To tell you the story of my body, do I tell you how much I weighed at my heaviest? Do I tell you that number, the shameful truth of it always strangling me? Do I tell you I know I should not consider the truth of my body shameful? Or do I just tell you the truth while holding my breath and awaiting your judgment?

    At my heaviest, I weighed 577 pounds at six feet, three inches tall. That is a staggering number, one I can hardly believe, but at one point, that was the truth of my body. I learned of the number at a Cleveland Clinic in Weston, Florida. I don’t know how I let things get so out of control, but I do.

    My father went with me to Cleveland Clinic. I was in my late twenties. It was July. Outside, it was hot and muggy and lushly green. In the clinic, the air was frigid and antiseptic. Everything was slick, expensive wood, marble. I thought, This is how I am spending my summer vacation.

    There were seven other people in the meeting room—an orientation session for gastric bypass surgery—two fat guys, a slightly overweight woman and her thin husband, two people in lab coats, and another large woman. As I surveyed my surroundings, I did that thing fat people tend to do around other fat people—I measured myself in relation to their size. I was bigger than five, smaller than two. At least, that is what I told myself. For $270, I spent a good portion of my day listening to the benefits of having my anatomy drastically altered to lose weight. It was, the doctors said, the only effective therapy for obesity. They were doctors. They were supposed to know what was best for me. I wanted to believe them.

    A psychiatrist talked to those of us assembled about how to prepare for the surgery, how to deal with food once our stomachs became the size of a thumb, how to accept that the normal people (his words, not mine) in our lives might try to sabotage our weight loss because they were invested in the idea of us as fat people. We learned how our bodies would be nutrient-deprived for the rest of our lives, how we would never be able to eat or drink within half an hour of doing one or the other. Our hair would thin, maybe fall out. Our bodies could be prone to dumping syndrome, a condition whose name doesn’t require a great deal of imagination to decipher. And of course, there were the surgical risks. We could die on the operating table or succumb to infection in the days following the procedure.

    It was a good news/bad news scenario. Bad news: our lives and bodies would never be the same (if we even survived the surgery). Good news: we would be thin. We would lose 75 percent of our excess weight within the first year. We would become next to normal.

    What those doctors offered was so tempting, so seductive: this notion that we could fall asleep for a few hours, and within a year of waking up, most of our problems would be solved, at least according to the medical establishment. That is, of course, if we continued to delude ourselves that our bodies were our biggest problem.

    After the presentation there was a question-and-answer session. I had neither questions nor answers, but the woman to my right, the woman who clearly did not need to be there because she was no more than forty or so pounds overweight, dominated the session, asking intimate, personal questions that broke my heart. As she interrogated the doctors, her husband sat next to her, smirking. It became clear why she was there. It was all about him and how he saw her body. There is nothing sadder, I thought, choosing to ignore why I was sitting in that same room, choosing to ignore that there were a great many people in my own life who saw my body before they ever saw or considered me.

    Later in the day, the doctors showed videos of the surgery—cameras and surgical tools in slick inner cavities cutting, pushing, closing, removing essential parts of the human body. The insides were steamy red and pink and yellow. It was grotesque and chilling. My father, on my left, was ashen, clearly shaken by the brutal display. What do you think? he asked quietly. This is a total freak show, I said. He nodded. This was the first thing we had agreed on in years. Then the video ended and the doctor smiled and chirped that the procedure was brief, done laparoscopically. He assured us he had done over three thousand operations, lost only one patient—an 850-pound man, he said, his voice dropping to an apologetic whisper, as if the shame of that man’s body could not be spoken with the full force of his voice. Then, the doctor told us the price of happiness—$25,000, minus a $270 discount for the orientation fee once a deposit for the procedure was made.

    Before this torment was over, there was a one-on-one consultation with the doctor in a private examination room. Before the doctor entered, his assistant, an intern, took down my vital information. I was weighed, measured, quietly judged. The intern listened to my heartbeat, felt my throat glands, made some additional notes. The doctor finally breezed in after half an hour. He looked me up and down. He glanced at my new chart, quickly flipping through the pages. Yes, yes, he said. You’re a perfect candidate for the surgery. We’ll get you booked right away. Then he was gone. The intern wrote me prescriptions for the preliminary tests I would need, and I left with a letter verifying that I’d completed the orientation session. It was clear that they did this every day. I was not unique. I was not special. I was a body, one requiring repair, and there are many of us in this world, living in such utterly human bodies.

    My father, who had been waiting in the well-appointed atrium, put a hand on my shoulder. You’re not at this point yet, he said. A little more self-control. Exercising twice a day. That’s all you need. I agreed, nodding vigorously, but later, alone in my bedroom, I pored over the pamphlets I had received, unable to look away from the before/after pictures. I wanted, I still want, that after so badly.

    And I remembered the result of being weighed and measured and judged, the unfathomable number: 577 pounds. I thought I had known shame in my life, but that night, I truly knew shame. I did not know if I would ever find my way past that shame and toward a place where I could face my body, accept my body, change my body.

    4

    This book, Hunger, is a book about living in the world when you are not a few or even forty pounds overweight. This is a book about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight, when you are not obese or morbidly obese but super morbidly obese according to your body mass index, or BMI.

    BMI is a term that sounds so technical and inhumane that I am always eager to disregard the measure. Nonetheless, it is a term, and a measure, that allows the medical establishment to try and bring a sense of discipline to undisciplined bodies.

    One’s BMI is one’s weight, in kilograms, divided by the square of one’s height in meters. Math is hard. There are various markers that then define the amount of unruliness a human body might carry. If your BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9, you are normal. If your BMI is 25 or higher, you are overweight. If your BMI is 30 or higher, you are obese, and if your BMI is higher than 40, you are morbidly obese, and if the measure is higher than 50, you are super morbidly obese. My BMI is higher than 50.

    In truth, many medical designations are arbitrary. It is worth noting that in 1998, medical professionals, under the direction of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, lowered the BMI threshold for normal bodies to below 25 and, in doing so, doubled the number of obese Americans. One of their reasons for lowering the cutoff: A round number like 25 would be easy for people to remember.

    These terms themselves are somewhat horrifying. Obese is an unpleasant word from the Latin obesus, meaning having eaten until fat, which is, in a literal sense, fair enough. But when people use the word obese, they aren’t merely being literal. They are offering forth an accusation. It is strange, and perhaps sad, that medical doctors came up with this terminology when they are charged with first doing no harm. The modifier morbidly makes the fat body a death sentence when such is not the case. The term morbid obesity frames fat people like we are the walking dead, and the medical establishment treats us accordingly.

    The cultural measure for obesity often seems to be anyone who appears to be larger than a size 6, or anyone whose body doesn’t naturally cater to the male gaze, or anyone with cellulite on her thighs.

    I do not weigh 577 pounds now. I am still very fat, but I weigh about 150 pounds less than that. With every new diet attempt I shave off a few pounds here, a few pounds there. This is all relative. I am not small. I will never be small. For one, I am tall. That is both a curse and a saving grace. I have presence, I am told. I take up space. I intimidate. I do not want to take up space. I want to go unnoticed. I want to hide. I want to disappear until I gain control of my body.

    I don’t know how things got so out of control, or I do. This is my refrain. Losing control of my body was a matter of accretion. I began eating to change my body. I was willful in this. Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure another such violation, and so I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away. Even at that young age, I understood that to be fat was to be undesirable to men, to be beneath their contempt, and I already knew too much about their contempt. This is what most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.

    5

    What you need to know is that my life is split in two, cleaved not so neatly. There is the before and the after. Before I gained weight. After I gained weight. Before I was raped. After I was raped.

    6

    In the before of my life, I was so very young and sheltered. I knew nothing about anything. I didn’t know I could suffer or the breadth and scope of what suffering could be. I didn’t know that I could give voice to my suffering when I did suffer. I didn’t know there were better ways to deal with my suffering. Of all the things I wish I knew then that I know now, I wish I had known I could talk to my parents and get help, and turn to something other than food. I wish I had known that my violation was not my fault.

    What I did know was food, so I ate because I understood that I could take up more space. I could become more solid, stronger, safer. I understood, from the way I saw people stare at fat people, from the way I stared at fat people, that too much weight was undesirable. If I was undesirable, I could keep more hurt away. At least, I hoped I could keep more hurt away because in the after, I knew too much about hurt. I knew too much about hurt, but I didn’t know how much more a girl could suffer until I did.

    But. This is what I did. This is the body I made. I am corpulent—rolls of brown flesh, arms and thighs and belly. The fat eventually had nowhere to go, so it created its own paths around my body. I am riven with stretch marks, pockets of cellulite on my massive thighs. The fat created a new body, one that shamed me but one that made me feel safe, and more than anything, I desperately needed to feel safe. I needed to feel like a fortress, impermeable. I did not want anything or anyone to touch me.

    I did this to myself. This is my fault and my responsibility. This is what I tell myself, though I should not bear the responsibility for this body alone.

    7

    This is the reality of living in my body: I am trapped in a cage. The frustrating thing about cages is that you’re trapped but you can see exactly what you want. You can reach out from the cage, but only so far.

    It would be easy to pretend I am just fine with my body as it is. I wish I did not see my body as something for which I should apologize or provide explanation. I’m a feminist and I believe in doing away with the rigid beauty standards that force women to conform to unrealistic ideals. I believe we should have broader definitions of beauty that include diverse body types. I believe it is so important for women to feel comfortable in their bodies, without wanting to change every single thing about their bodies to find that comfort. I (want to) believe my worth as a human being does not reside in my size or appearance. I know, having grown up in a culture that is generally toxic to women and constantly trying to discipline women’s bodies, that it is important to resist unreasonable standards for how my body or any body should look.

    What I know and what I feel are two very different things.

    Feeling comfortable in my body isn’t entirely about beauty standards. It is not entirely about ideals. It’s about how I feel in my skin and bones, from one day to the next.

    I am not comfortable in my body. Nearly everything physical is difficult. When I move around, I feel every extra pound I am carrying. I have no stamina. When I walk for long periods of time, my thighs and calves ache. My feet ache. My lower back aches. More often than not, I am in some kind of physical pain. Every morning, I am so stiff I contemplate just spending the duration of the day in bed. I have a pinched nerve, and so if I stand for too long, my right leg goes numb and then I sort of lurch about until the feeling returns.

    When it’s hot, I sweat profusely, mostly from my head, and then I feel self-conscious and find myself constantly wiping the sweat from my face. Rivulets of sweat spring forth between my breasts and pool at the base of my spine. My shirt gets

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