I would like to be like Faith, the Valiant superhero who is large. Not only can we no longer bear children, the only true purpose for the female life, and the reason we must be attractive to men, but biology conspires to make us more fat. It gets even more difficult at menopause. Today, when society pays at least lip service to the idea of diversity, we are supposed to be not only thin and fit and beautiful but also, if we are not, to pretend that it doesn’t matter ( even though it does). To succeed, we were told, a woman must be thin and fit and beautiful.
My mom (and Roxane’s) were only trying to teach their daughters how to get ahead. My mother used to beg me to lose weight, starting when I was twelve (5’ 3” and 113 pounds), telling me that “boys don’t like fat girls.” Even now, at 64 years of age, when I know that my life is about more than boys liking me, those thoughts won’t go away. Women obsess about our appearances because society consistently tells us that it is our most important duty. I can’t claim I’m never angry or never hating, but it doesn’t burn me up inside.Įxcept I know that she is a different person than I am, and what works for me as a coping system might not work for her. Working up a sweat on a regular basis burns up a lot of my hostility. I don’t do work because I expect it to make me a fashion model or an Olympic athlete but because it keeps me sane. Various eating systems have made me feel variously better and worse, but if I didn’t exercise, I would go mad. She talks about regularly starting (and giving up on) a diet-and-exercise plan, and my first suggestion is to uncouple those two things. Still, reading about her pain, the Jewish mother in me did want to lean in and offer Gay some advice. I can assure you that every woman in Western society who is larger than a Size 0 knows about diet and exercise. The people who tell her that maybe she doesn’t really want dessert. Everything about her life, good or bad, is dismissed by those who only see her size.Īnd then there are the people who think they are helping her. Instead of taking her ideas seriously, critics comment on her looks. People complain to airlines about having to sit next to her, even if she pays for two seats. Strangers in the supermarket take away food from her shopping cart.
Her descriptions of her experiences are harrowing. By building a wall around herself, she would be safe. She knew that a woman who is overweight is considered to be ugly – and an ugly woman is invisible. Gay started to overeat because she wanted to make herself unattractive to men so she wouldn’t get attacked again. I feel my own version of what she feels, and I went through my own version of what she went through.
Because I have these privileges, I could sneer at her with my societally-approved advantages, but I can’t.
Unlike Gay, I was not gang-raped when I was twelve years old. As a Jew, my people have a history of persecution, but I can pass. Sure, I could drop twenty or thirty pounds to look more like the mannequins in the department stores, but I can pass. It’s incredibly honest, so much so that I couldn’t look away, even as I squirmed in recognition. Hunger is about what happened to her, how she got this way, and what it’s like to live the way she lives. In addition to being an accomplished author and journalist, Roxane Gay is, in her own words, a morbidly obese woman of color. Beyond that, if you want to know more, you’ll have to keep reading. I finished reading it about ten days ago, and I cannot stop thinking about it.ĭoes it have anything to do with comics? Well, Gay wrote a mini-series for Marvel. It kept me glued to my couch for a long weekend. Roxane Gay’s new book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is a knock-out of a book.