Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

by Roxane Gay

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.

If I was undesirable, I could keep more hurt away. At least, I hoped I could keep more hurt away because in the after, I knew too much about hurt.

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.

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

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

All too often, what “he said” matters more, so we just swallow the truth. We swallow it, and more often than not, that truth turns rancid. It spreads through the body like an infection. It becomes depression or addiction or obsession or some other physical manifestation of the silence of what she would have said, needed to say, couldn’t say.

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

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 liked the idea of a boy asking me out, taking me on a date, kissing me, but I did not want to actually be alone with a boy, because a boy could hurt me.

But I couldn’t forget my body. I could not escape it. I didn’t know how, and the world was always there to remind me.

They forget that you are a person. You are your body, nothing more, and your body should damn well become less.

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

That is how pervasive damaging cultural messages about unruly bodies are—that even as we age, no matter what material successes we achieve, we cannot be satisfied or happy unless we are also thin.

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

Most of us have these versions of ourselves that terrify us. We have these imperfect bodies we don’t quite know how to cope with. We have these shames we keep to ourselves because to show ourselves as we are, no more and no less, would be too much.

I was broken and then I broke some more, and I am not yet healed but I have started believing I will be.