Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

by Roxane Gay

I wish I had known that my violation was not my fault.

It would be easy to pretend I am just fine with my body as it is. I wish I did not see my body as something for which I should apologize or provide explanation.

It took me a long time, but I prefer “victim” to “survivor” now. I don’t want to diminish the gravity of what happened. I don’t want to pretend I’m on some triumphant, uplifting journey. I don’t want to pretend that everything is okay. I’m living with what happened, moving forward without forgetting, moving forward without pretending I am unscarred.

She is leaning against a car, giving a look to the photographer, my father, the kind of intimate look that makes me want to turn away to afford them some privacy. She put this picture in the album even though she is one of the most private people I know. She wanted me to see this gorgeous image, to know she and my father have always loved each other.

Pictures of screaming babies are hilarious when you know they are pictures of happy babies who are simply having a random fit of baby rage.

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 are evidence that, once, I was pretty and sometimes sweet. Beneath what you see now, there is still a pretty girl who loves pretty-girl things.

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.

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

Those boys treated me like nothing so I became nothing.

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.

Unfortunately, my fearful silence cannot be undone. I cannot tell that twelve-year-old girl who was so scared and alone just how much she was loved, how unconditionally, but oh, how I want to. How I want to comfort her. How I want to save her from so much of what would happen next.

I was too young, in a sad semblance of a relationship with a boy who knew too much, wanted too much. I wanted too much too, but he and I wanted very different things.

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

They reach out via e-mail, or Facebook, or at events, and ask me, eagerly, if I remember them too. They share anecdotes that make me seem like I was interesting and not as unbearable as I remember myself.

It is only now, in my early forties, that I have started to put my foot down and say, when they try to broach the conversation of my body, “No. I will not discuss my body with you. No. My body, how I move it, how I nourish it, is not your business.”

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

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

To be that girl in a clothing store is to be the loneliest girl in the world.

With my tattoos, I get to say, these are choices I make for my body, with full-throated consent. This is how I mark myself. This is how I take my body back.

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.

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’ve been thinking about how so much testimony is demanded of women, and still, there are those who doubt our stories.

I am not cold. I wasn’t ever cold. My warmth was hidden far away from anything that could bring hurt because I knew I didn’t have the inner scaffolding to endure any more hurt in those protected places.

I am not promiscuous with my warmth, but when I share it, my warmth can be as hot as the sun.

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.