Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

by Roxane Gay

In many ways, that’s the best means of describing my relationship with my family, and with nearly everyone in my life. There is the great life we share and the more difficult parts of my life we do not, that they know little about. There

I want to be able to hold the why in my hands, to dissect it or tear it apart or burn it and read the ashes even though I am afraid of what I will do with what I see there.

I wanted him to fill the loneliness, to ease the ache of being awkward, of being the girl always on the outside looking in.

When I read the books, though, I could pretend that a better life was possible for me, one where I fit in somewhere, anywhere, and I had friends and a handsome boyfriend and a loving family who knew everything about me.

Attending boarding school is how upper-middle-class girls run away, to be sure.

Left to my own devices at boarding school, I lost any semblance of control over what I put into my body. Suddenly, there were all kinds of food available to me.

The freedom of being able to eat, so extravagantly and without limit, offered me the only true pleasure I knew in high school.

I found ways to hide in plain sight, to keep feeding a hunger that could never be satisfied—the hunger to stop hurting.

maybe because some part of me knew I needed help, and I was so hungry for it.

I lost what currency I had gained over the summer.

Loneliness remained a constant companion. I didn’t have many friends. I was awkward and maladjusted around the friends I did have, and most of the time, I was certain they only tolerated me out of pity. I regularly said the wrong things. I invented a boyfriend,

When I was in the theater, all darkened and dusty, I was useful. I was competent. People told me to do things and I did those things. I could apply myself to the tasks at hand and forget about the boys in the woods and what they did to my body.

Smoking felt good and always gave me a light buzz. Smoking also made me feel cool when I knew I was very, very uncool.

I loved that feeling, that I was interesting enough to break rules, to believe rules did not apply to me.

I was always very high-strung about school for many reasons, not the least of which was a pressure to perform and the comfort of knowing that schoolwork, at least, was something in my control. I knew how to study and memorize and make sense of complicated things, as long as they had nothing to do with me.

because there was a rush of solace when I ate or spent money.

I was able to forget about school, about my family, about my misery, when I worked on shows.

When I was backstage or in the set shop or up on the catwalk, there were things that needed to be done and I knew how to do them. Being useful was a balm.

I became immersed in the anonymity, and in the ability to present myself to others as I saw fit. I lost myself in feeling connected to other people for the first time in seven years.

Because I read so much, I was a romantic in my heart of hearts, but my desire to be part of a romantic story was a very intellectual, detached one.

The men I talked to online allowed me to enjoy the idea of romance and love and lust and sex while keeping my body safe. I could pretend to be thin and sexy and confident.

It was not as easy to believe these truths as it was to know them.

Completely unmoored from my previous life, I could be a blank slate. I could reinvent myself. I could take the kinds of risks that would have, not long before, been unthinkable.

I could complete the break that had long been growing between me and my family and everything I had ever known.

I was fat and I continued to eat to get fatter and I talked to men without having to be touched by men.

At first, I did it because it felt safer and I could be sexual without having to actually be sexual. Then, as I got fatter, it was a way to meet people and hopefully charm them with personality before having to show them the truth of my big body.

It was easier to lose myself in the virtual world than to try and put my life back together or face these people who thought they knew me. I was still broken and I liked how it felt to simply accept that everything was wrong and couldn’t be set right. It felt good to not try and pretend.

I ate mindlessly, just to fill the gaping wound of me or to try to fill the gaping wound of me. No matter how much I ate, I still hurt and I was still terrified of other people and the memories I couldn’t escape.

I assumed that he was going to make fun of me because I had long become accustomed to people, men mostly, calling out cruelties from their cars, their bicycles, when they walked on by—letting me know exactly what they thought of my body.

We stayed in touch, and for a time, there was a genuine yearning between us for the idea of what we could be. And still, that grand gesture never came. I fell back into the familiar embrace of self-loathing. I blamed myself. I blamed my body.

Some part of me was still willing to play that role after my lost year in Arizona so that, despite my desperate loneliness, I might still be connected to something—work, writing, family.

I was so lonely I was willing to tolerate these relationships. The faint resemblance of human connection was enough. It had to be enough even though it wasn’t.

I was intimately aware of every single pound that accumulated and clung to my body. And everyone around me was also intimately aware. My family’s concern became a constant chorus of nagging, always well intended, but mostly a reminder of how I was a failure in the most basic of my human responsibilities—maintaining my body.

My family’s constant pressure to lose weight made me stubborn, even though the only person I was really hurting was myself.

The constant pressure made me refuse to lose weight to punish these people who claimed to love me but wouldn’t accept me as I was.

I learned how to tune out my parents, my brothers, people on the street. I learned how to live in my head, where I could ignore the world that refused to accept me,

For years at a time, there was me, and the woman I saw myself as while living in my head, and the woman who had to carry around my overweight body. They were not the same person. They couldn’t be, or I wouldn’t have survived any of it.

You are your body, nothing more, and your body should damn well become less.

It is a powerful lie to equate thinness with self-worth. Clearly, this lie is damn convincing because the weight-loss industry thrives. Women continue to try to bend themselves to societal will. Women continue to hunger. And so do I.

What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?

The less space they take up, the more they matter.

I deny myself the right to space when I am in public, trying to fold in on myself, to make my body invisible even though it is, in fact, grandly visible.

I don’t want to change who I am. I want to change how I look. On my better days, when I feel up to the fight, I want to change how this world responds to how I look because intellectually I know my body is not the real problem.

I am not fearless the way people assume I am, but despite all my fears, I am willing to take chances

I have a lot of life left, and my god, I want to do something different than what I have done for the last twenty years. I want to move freely. I want to be free.

We’re supposed to restrict our eating while indulging in the fantasy that we can, indeed, indulge.

I am left feeling low, like a failure. I am left feeling ravenously hungry and then I try to satisfy that hunger so I might undo all the progress I’ve made. And then I hunger even more.

I don’t eat breakfast because I’m not hungry or I don’t have time or there is no food in the house, which are all excuses for not being willing to take proper care of myself. Sometimes, I eat lunch—a sandwich from Subway or Jimmy John’s. Or two sandwiches. And chips. And a cookie or three. And it’s fine, I tell myself, because I haven’t eaten all day. Or I wait until dinner and then the day is nearly done and I can eat whatever I want, I tell myself, because I have not eaten all day.

As I fall asleep, my stomach churning, the acids making my heartburn flare, I think about the next day. I think, Tomorrow, I will make good choices. I am always holding on to the hope of tomorrow.

I create these goals and make half-hearted attempts to meet these goals, but I never do, and then I enter a spiral of feeling like a failure for not ever being able to be better, to get smaller. I reserve my most elaborate delusions and disappointments for myself.