“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.” At her heaviest, Gay, who is six-foot-three, weighed 577 pounds. “Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it,” Gay writes. In Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, out this month, she has crafted a ferocious and unapologetic work about her relationship with her physical self and experience negotiating the world as, in Gay’s words, “a woman of size.” As a child, Gay was the victim of sexual violence, a topic she has mined elsewhere in her writing here she explains how the incident led her to gain weight as a defense mechanism. In that latter sense, the 42-year-old Gay’s latest effort might very well be her rawest and most revealing. She is a novelist, critic, essayist, comic-book author, screenwriter, and memoirist who has proved unafraid to explore and expose even the most upsetting parts of her personal history in writing. The New York Times bestselling author is a rare mainstream crossover, both incisive and remarkably prolific, producing boundary-pushing work across a range of genres. By now, the release of a new book by Roxane Gay has become a cultural event.
