Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

by Roxane Gay

I don’t want them to think me more fragile than I am. I am stronger than I am broken. I don’t want them, or anyone, to think I am nothing more than the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

It is a powerful lie to equate thinness with self-worth.

There are so many things I hunger for.

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.

This is the world we live in. Looks matter, and we can say, “But but but . . .” But no. Looks matter. Bodies matter.

The story of my life is wanting, hungering, for what I cannot have or, perhaps, wanting what I dare not allow myself to have.

She was trying to disappear and she couldn’t. It is unbearable to want something so little and need it so much.

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. You have to allow yourself this pain. You have chosen this suffering, and at the end of it, your body will be different. Maybe your body will feel more like yours.

You can’t look up to me. I’m a fucking mess.

Having standards, or trying to have standards and sticking to them, has proven to be more difficult than I imagined. It is hard to say, “I deserve something good. I deserve someone I actually like,” and believe it because I am so used to believing, “I deserve whatever mediocrity comes my way.” In our culture, we talk a lot about change and growing up, but man, we don’t talk nearly enough about how difficult it is. It is difficult. For me, it is difficult to believe I matter and I deserve nice things and I deserve to be around nice people.

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.

My eyes are wide open. They are prepared for whatever they might see.

I was a mess and then I grew up and away from that terrible day and became a different kind of mess—a woman doing the best she can to love well and be loved well, to live well and be human and good.