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Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body Kindle Edition BY Roxane Gay

Hi everyone i’m Maria and this is promotekdbook.com.

Today i’m going to be doing a book review on hunger by Roxane gay.

Let me try to hold this so it doesn’t glare all over the screen.

This is a book I picked up for nonfiction November and oh man am I glad that I did because it was great.

This is a memoir slash essay collection from Roxane gay.

I’ve read almost everything that she’s put out.

I haven’t read difficult women yet but this just like solidifies in my mind that I just love Roxane gay specifically as a non-fiction writer.

I think that she is just very smart and has a great insight and just is really great at observing the world, observing how people react to her and she’s also just really open and honest.

But I should probably give you a little bit of a synopsis first before I get into completely raving about this book.

Like I said, it’s a memoir slash essay collection.

The subtitle to this is a memoir of my body.

So in this book Roxane gay talks about her own personal just journey with her image, her body, her weight.

She talks very openly and honestly about the way she views food, the way that she handles food or has handled food in the past.

I will say that this book does deserve a little bit of a trigger warning.

She talks about her assault when she was younger and how that impacted the way that she views food and eating and the way that she views her body.

But yeah this is just like her own reflection on herself and her views on her own body as well as the way that other people view her body and her difficulties in being a larger woman in this society that doesn’t like larger women to put it nicely.

Yeah I really, really love this book a lot.

There were so many times in here where I wanted to take pictures and post quotes from this book but I felt like if I did it every time I felt like it I probably would have posted almost the entire book.

Yeah Roxane gay is just really, really smart.

And I think she is also, somehow, completely okay with being completely honest with herself and her life and her points of view in a way that to me feels very foreign.

Like I would never be this open about the way that I feel about myself.

But she is completely willing to be and I applaud her for that.

And also just a lot of the things that she talked about I feel like are things that I know I personally have thought or felt on various occasions and I’m sure that a lot of other people, especially women, have thought or felt on various occasions.

Yeah she talks about again growing up, her childhood, the different decisions that she’s made over time.

She doesn’t sugarcoat anything.

Like she very much admits to her faults and her problems and she doesn’t try to pretend like she’s this perfect person.

And she says also towards the beginning of the book that this isn’t like an aspirational or inspirational type of book.

This is just her writing about her life.

There isn’t going to be this like ending scene where she’s suddenly like super skinny again and super motivated and motivates all of us to get healthy and happier.

There’s no like happy ending here.

She continues to struggle and she continues to fight and she continues to try to figure out how to treat her body well which I just find really, really refreshing.

The chapters in here are all really, really short so they kind of feel like vignettes.

And personally I really liked it like that because it’s sort of like dipping in and out of her thought process in different parts of her life.

But I know that a lot of other people felt or might feel that it doesn’t go quite deep enough.

I will say that there’s nothing in here that’s necessarily like revolutionary when it comes to body image or anything like that.

But again I think it’s just her honesty and her openness in talking about the stuff that really sort of sets this book apart.

There are parts of this book where she talks about the conflict that she often feels being a feminist and recognizing the way that the world tells her that her body is supposed to be a specific way but also kind of wanting her body to fit that specific mold because she knows that it would be easier and like she wouldn’t have to deal with quite as much crap.

She talks about how she knows like what she’s supposed to do a lot of time but it’s really hard for her to like convince herself to do those things.

Again I feel like that this is just a book that’s just really, really relatable and really honest.

I don’t know if it’s just me but I felt like there were just so many chapters in here where I was just, I felt like Roxane gay was in my own head.

Yeah it was, it was amazing.

There’s one chapter in here that I kind of want to read. It’s a relatively short chapter.

It’s like a page and a half ever maybe even just like one page.

And I feel like it sums up a lot of what this book is about as well as just like my own personal feelings about this whole topic.

It’s from chapter 41 and it says, “I hate myself.

OR society tells me I’m supposed to hate myself.

So I guess this at least is something that I’m 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 40s that I am able to admit that I like myself even though I’m nagged by the suspicion that I shouldn’t.

For so long I gave in to my self-loathing. I refuse 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 for 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 the noise and to try to forgive myself for the mistakes I made in high school, in college, and throughout my 20s, to have some empathy for why I made those mistakes. I don’t want to change who I am.

I want to change how I look.

On my better days when I feel up to the fight, I want to change how this world responds to how I look because intellectually I know my body is not the real problem.

On bad days, though, I forget how to separate my personality, the heart of who I am from my body.

I forgot how to shield myself from the cruelties of this world.” Man it’s good writing in here.

So yeah if you haven’t already, I highly recommend picking up this book.

Again a trigger warning because there is discussions in here about her assault when she was 12 years old.

But also probably trigger warnings if you have issues with like eating disorders and whatnot because she does talk about her own sort of eating disorders that she’s had over the years and the various ways that she has treated her body poorly.

But otherwise I highly, highly recommend picking this up.

I gave this one a four out of five stars.

It’s probably more like four and a half for me.

The only reason why it’s not a five-star book is because one, I wanted it to be longer and maybe a little bit deeper.

But that’s just me being very picky and just wanting more from Roxane gay all the time.

So. But yeah I love this book.

It’s definitely gonna be one of my favorites of the year.

It’s probably like up there in my top five, I would actually say.

So yeah that’s everything that I have for you guys.

Feel free to leave a comment down below letting me know if you’ve read hunger by Roxane gay.

Or if you have any questions about it, definitely leave that down in the comment section as well.

So yeah that’s all I have for now and thanks for reading.

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