Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.

“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. The girl I was got into a lot of difficulty, so I buried her. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . Even if I was confined to a body I hardly knew or could comprehend, at least I was secure.

Roxane Gay has written intimately and sensitively about food and body in her wildly popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog. She has done this by leveraging her own emotional and psychological problems to explore our common fears about pleasure, consumption, attractiveness, and health. Being a woman who labels her own physique as "wildly undisciplined," Roxane is aware of the conflict that exists between self-comfort and self-care, as well as between want and denial. In Hunger, she takes readers on a quest to comprehend and, in the end, rescue herself as she examines her history, particularly the horrific incident of violence that marked a turning point in her early life.

In a time when being bigger makes you feel smaller, Roxane explores what it means to learn self-care. She does this by feeding her hunger for tasty and satisfying food, a smaller, safer body, and a body that can love and be loved. Her candour, vulnerability, and power have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation.