Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

by Roxane Gay

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.

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.

My body is a cage. My body is a cage of my own making. I am still trying to figure my way out of it. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than twenty years.

The ways in which I am my mother’s daughter are infinite.

As an adult, I have gone through these albums many times. I have been trying to remember. At first, I looked for pictures to show a child of my own, “This is where you come from,” so when I have that child, she might know her family knows how to love, however imperfectly, so she knows her mother has always been loved and so she may know that she, in turn, will always be loved. It is important to show a child love in many forms, and this is the one good thing I have to offer, no matter how this child comes into my life.

They tried to see how far they could go. I was a toy, used recklessly. Eventually, I stopped screaming, I stopped moving, I stopped fighting. I stopped praying and believing God would save me. I did not stop hurting. The pain was constant.

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

That was the first time I realized that weight loss, thinness really, was social currency.

The medical community is not particularly interested in taking the pain of women seriously.

I knew how to study and memorize and make sense of complicated things, as long as they had nothing to do with me.

I did not care about my body because my body was nothing.

He has so much hope for what I could be if only I could overcome my body. His hope breaks my heart.

When you’re overweight, your body becomes a matter of public record in many respects. Your body is constantly and prominently on display. People project assumed narratives onto your body and are not at all interested in the truth of your body, whatever that truth might be. Fat, much like skin color, is something you cannot hide, no matter how dark the clothing you wear, or how diligently you avoid horizontal stripes. You may become very adept at playing the role of wallflower. You may learn how to be the life of the party so that people are too busy laughing at or with you to focus on the elephant in the room. You may do whatever you have to do to survive a world that has little patience or compassion for a body like yours. Regardless of what you do, your body is the subject of public discourse with family, friends, and strangers alike. Your body is subject to commentary when you gain weight, lose weight, or maintain your unacceptable weight. People are quick to offer you statistics and information about the dangers of obesity, as if you are not only fat but also incredibly stupid, unaware, delusional about the realities of your body and a world that is vigorously inhospitable to that body. This commentary is often couched as concern, as people only having your best interests at heart. They forget that you are a person. You are your body, nothing more, and your body should damn well become less.

Then I became self-conscious and tucked my thumb against the palm of my hand, as if I should hide my thumb, as if I had no right to feel pretty, to feel good about myself, to acknowledge myself as a woman when I am clearly not following the rules for being a woman—to be small, to take up less space.

I hate myself. Or society tells me I am supposed to hate myself, so I guess this, at least, is something I am doing right. Or, I should say, I hate my body. I hate my weakness at being unable to control my body. I hate how I feel in my body. I hate how people see my body. I hate how people stare at my body, treat my body, comment on my body. I hate equating my self-worth with the state of my body and how difficult it is to overcome this equation. I hate how hard it is to accept my human frailties. I hate that I am letting down so many women when I cannot embrace my body at any size. But I also like myself, my personality, my weirdness, my sense of humor, my wild and deep romantic streak, how I love, how I write, my kindness and my mean streak. It is only now, in my forties, that I am able to admit that I like myself, even though I am nagged by this suspicion that I shouldn’t. For so long, I gave in to my self-loathing. I refused to allow myself the simple pleasure of accepting who I am and how I live and love and think and see the world. But then, I got older and I cared less about what other people think. I got older and realized I was exhausted by all my self-loathing and that I was hating myself, in part, because I assumed that’s what other people expected from me, as if my self-hatred was the price I needed to pay for living in an overweight body. It was much, much easier to just try and shut out all of that noise, and to try and forgive myself for the mistakes I made ...

I reserve my most elaborate delusions and disappointments for myself.

I do not suffer from ignorance where exercise is related. I suffer from inertia.

I am not angry. I am jealous. I am seething with jealousy. I want to be part of the active world. I want it so very badly. There are so many things I hunger for.

I am self-conscious beyond measure. I am intensely and constantly preoccupied with my body in the world because I know what people think and what they see when they look at me. I know that I am breaking the unspoken rules of what a woman should look like. I am hyperconscious of how I take up space. As a woman, as a fat woman, I am not supposed to take up space. And yet, as a feminist, I am encouraged to believe I can take up space. I live in a contradictory space where I should try to take up space but not too much of it, and not in the wrong way, where the wrong way is any way where my body is concerned. Whenever I am near other people, I try to fold into myself so that my body doesn’t disrupt the space of others. I take this to extremes. I will spend five-hour flights tucked against the window, my arm tucked into the seat belt, as if trying to create absence where there is excessive presence. I walk at the edge of sidewalks. In buildings I hug the walls. I try to walk as quickly as I can when I feel someone behind me so I don’t get in their way, as if I have less of a right to be in the world than anyone else. I am hyperconscious of how I take up space and I resent having to be this way, so when people around me aren’t mindful of how they take up space, I feel pure rage. I am seething with jealousy. I hate that they don’t have to consider how they take up space. They can walk at any speed they want. Their limbs can spill over armrests. They can dawdle and stretch and shr...

I am terrified of other people. I am terrified of the way they are likely to look at me, stare, talk about me or say cruel things to me.

Sometimes, I decide on an outfit and leave my bedroom. It’s a mundane moment, but for me, it is not. I decide, Today, I am a professional and I will look the part. I make breakfast, or get my things together for work. I feel strange and awkward. In a matter of moments, it begins to feel like these unfamiliar clothes are strangling me. I see and feel every unflattering bulge and curve. My throat constricts. I can’t breathe. The clothes shrink. Sleeves become tourniquets. Slacks become shackles. I start to panic, and before I know it, I am tearing the bright, beautiful clothes off because I don’t deserve to wear them.

Buying clothes is an ordeal. It is but one of many humiliations fat people endure. I hate clothes shopping and have for years because I know I’m not going to find anything I actually want to wear. We hear the statistics about how obesity is a major problem in the United States, and yet there are a mere handful of stores where fat people can buy clothes. At most of those stores, the clothes are hideous.

Fat daughters and their thin mothers have especially complicated relationships.

I often feel ravenous even if I am not hungry. On bad days, and I have many bad days, I eat a lot. I tell myself I don’t do this. I tell myself that I’m not sitting around eating candy or Cheetos all day. That’s true. I don’t keep junk food at home. I don’t make a habit of eating junk food. But then I become fixated on a certain food and then I eat it and eat it and eat it for days on end, sometimes weeks, until I am sick of it. It is a compulsion, I suppose.

The longer I stayed with him, the worse he made me feel, and the better he made me feel because, at last, someone was telling me a truth about myself I already knew.

It’s hard for thin people to know how to talk to fat people about their bodies, whether their opinions are solicited or not. I get that, but it’s insulting to pretend I am not fat or to deny my body and its reality. It’s insulting to think I am somehow unaware of my physical appearance. And it’s insulting to assume that I am ashamed of myself for being fat, no matter how close to the truth that might be.

I do my best to pretend I am not in pain, that my back doesn’t ache, that I’m not whatever it is I am feeling, because I am not allowed to have a human body. If I am fat, I must also have the body of someone who is not fat. I must defy space and time and gravity.

And then there is how strangers treat my body. I am shoved in public spaces, as if my fat inures me from pain and/or as if I deserve pain, punishment for being fat. People step on my feet. They brush and bump against me. They run straight into me. I am highly visible, but I am regularly treated like I am invisible. My body receives no respect or consideration or care in public spaces. My body is treated like a public space.

When I look at family photos, which I assiduously avoid, I think, One of these things is not like the other, and it is a haunting, lonely feeling, thinking you don’t belong with the very people who know you in the truest, deepest ways.

I often tell my students that fiction is about desire in one way or another. The older I get, the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires. We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.

I am not a hugger. I never have been and I never will be. I hug my friends, and do so happily, but I am sparing with such affections. A hug means something to me; it is an act of profound intimacy, so I try not to get too promiscuous with it.

Because I am not a touchy-feely person, I always feel this light shock, this surprise, really, when my skin comes into contact with another person’s skin. Sometimes that shock is pleasant, like Oh, here is my body in the world. Sometimes, it is not. I never know which it will be.

Doctors generally adhere to the Hippocratic oath, where they swear to abide by an ethical code, where they swear to act, always, in their patients’ best interests. Unless the patient is overweight. I hate going to the doctor because they seem wholly unwilling to follow the Hippocratic oath when it comes to treating obese patients. The words “first do no harm” do not apply to unruly bodies.

In the examination room, I hold my hands in tight fists. I am on guard, ready to fight, and really, I do have to fight, for my dignity, for the right to basic medical treatment.

The most profound of those realizations was that part of healing is taking care of your body and learning how to have a humane relationship with your body. I was broken and then I broke some more, and I am not yet healed but I have started believing I will be.