Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

by Roxane Gay

But I soon realized I was not only writing a memoir of my body; I was forcing myself to look at what my body has endured, the weight I gained, and how hard it has been to both live with and lose that weight.

At my heaviest, I weighed 577 pounds at six feet, three inches tall. That is a staggering number, one I can hardly believe, but at one point, that was the truth of my body.

was, the doctors said, “the only effective therapy for obesity.” They were doctors. They were supposed to know what was best for me. I wanted to believe them.

It was a good news/bad news scenario. Bad news: our lives and bodies would never be the same (if we even survived the surgery). Good news: we would be thin. We would lose 75 percent of our excess weight within the first year. We would become next to normal.

It was all about him and how he saw her body. There is nothing sadder, I thought, choosing to ignore why I was sitting in that same room, choosing to ignore that there were a great many people in my own life who saw my body before they ever saw or considered me.

Then, the doctor told us the price of happiness—$25,000, minus a $270 discount for the orientation fee once a deposit for the procedure was made.

It was clear that they did this every day. I was not unique. I was not special. I was a body, one requiring repair, and there are many of us in this world, living in such utterly human bodies.

If your BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9, you are “normal.” If your BMI is 25 or higher, you are overweight. If your BMI is 30 or higher, you are obese, and if your BMI is higher than 40, you are morbidly obese, and if the measure is higher than 50, you are super morbidly obese. My BMI is higher than 50.

It is worth noting that in 1998, medical professionals, under the direction of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, lowered the BMI threshold for “normal” bodies to below 25 and, in doing so, doubled the number of obese Americans. One of their reasons for lowering the cutoff: “A round number like 25 would be easy for people to remember.”

“Obese” is an unpleasant word from the Latin obesus, meaning “having eaten until fat,” which is, in a literal sense, fair enough.

I do not weigh 577 pounds now. I am still very fat, but I weigh about 150 pounds less than that.

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.

I was willful in this. Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it. 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.

This is what most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.

Of all the things I wish I knew then that I know now, I wish I had known I could talk to my parents and get help, and turn to something other than food. I wish I had known that my violation was not my fault.

If I was undesirable, I could keep more hurt away.

corpulent—rolls

The fat created a new body, one that shamed me but one that made me feel safe, and more than anything, I desperately needed to feel safe. I needed to feel like a fortress, impermeable. I did not want anything or anyone to touch me.

This is the reality of living in my body: I am trapped in a cage. The frustrating thing about cages is that you’re trapped but you can see exactly what you want. You can reach out from the cage, but only so far.

Feeling comfortable in my body isn’t entirely about beauty standards. It is not entirely about ideals. It’s about how I feel in my skin and bones, from one day to the next.

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.

cordoned

I also don’t think there’s any shame in saying that when I was raped, I became a victim, and to this day, while I am also many other things, I am still a victim.

I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. She is still small and scared and ashamed, and perhaps I am writing my way back to her, trying to tell her everything she needs to hear.

I was miserable, but I was safe. Or at least I could tell myself I was safe.

Today, I am a fat woman. I don’t think I am ugly. I don’t hate myself in the way society would have me hate myself, but I do live in the world. I live in this body in this world, and I hate how the world all too often responds to this body.

Babies are cute, but they’re pretty useless, my best friend says. They can’t do much for themselves. You have to love them through that uselessness.

Sometimes we try to convince ourselves of things that are not true, reframing the past to better explain the present.

In these pictures, I get older. I smile less. I am still pretty. When I am twelve, I stop wearing skirts or most jewelry or doing anything with my hair, instead wearing it back in a tight bun or ponytail. I am still pretty. A few years after that, I will cut most of my hair off and start wearing oversized men’s clothing. I am less pretty. In these pictures I stare at the camera. I look hollow. I am hollow.

I am one woman who has experienced something countless women have experienced. I am a victim who survived. It could have been worse, so much worse. That’s what matters and is even more a travesty here, that having this kind of story is utterly common.

We don’t necessarily know how to hear stories about any kind of violence, because it is hard to accept that violence is as simple as it is complicated, that you can love someone who hurts you, that you can stay with someone who hurts you, that you can be hurt by someone who loves you, that you can be hurt by a complete stranger, that you can be hurt in so many terrible, intimate ways.

reticent

It is easier to use detached language like “assault” or “violation” or “incident” than it is to come out and say that when I was twelve years old, I was gang-raped by a boy I thought I loved and a group of his friends.

So many years past being raped, I tell myself what happened is “in the past.” This is only partly true. In too many ways, the past is still with me. The past is written on my body.

In my history of violence, there was a boy. I loved him. His name was Christopher. That’s not really his name. You know that. I was raped by Christopher and several of his friends in an abandoned hunting cabin in the woods where no one but those boys could hear me scream.

In truth, he treated me terribly and I thought I should be grateful that he bothered to treat me terribly, that he bothered with a girl like me at all.

friends. I wasn’t a girl to them. I was a thing, flesh and girl bones with which they could amuse themselves.

All those boys raped me. 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. They took a break. I huddled into myself and shook. I couldn’t move. I could not believe what was happening. I literally had no capacity for understanding my story as it was being written.

Other than Christopher, I don’t remember distinct details about them. They were boys who were not yet men but knew, already, how to do the damage of men.

He said/she said is why so many victims (or survivors, if you prefer that terminology) don’t come forward.

I was disgusting because I had allowed disgusting things to be done to me.

I did not dare subject what I had become to the children around me. I read, obsessively. When I read on the school bus, my classmates teased me.

When I read, I could forget. I could be anywhere in the world except in the eighth grade, lonely and holding tightly to my secret. I often say that reading and writing saved my life. I mean that quite literally.

I played the part of good girl, good daughter, good student. I went to church even though I had no faith. Guilt consumed me. I no longer believed in God because surely if there were a God, he would have saved me from Christopher and those boys in the woods.

I had (and have?) this void, this cavern of loneliness inside me that I have spent my whole life trying to fill.

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. In a better life, I could pretend I was a good girl.

For many, many years to come, I would keep telling myself that the barest minimum of acknowledgment from lovers was enough.

I stopped looking at my reflection in the mirror because I felt nothing but guilt and shame when I did.

Food offered comfort when I needed to be comforted and did not know how to ask for what I needed from those who loved me.

Haitians love the food from our island, but they judge gluttony.