After the assault, Gay deliberately ate in an attempt to make herself “repulsive” to men, turning her body into a protective fortress. Gay’s body, which, by her own description, is morbidly obese, is a memoir in itself: a record of the trauma she experienced when she was gang-raped at the age of twelve. Roxane Gay’s 2017 autobiography Hunger is appropriately subtitled A Memoir of (My) Body. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than 20 years. I’m a feminist and I know that it is important to resist unreasonable standards for how my body should look. It would be easy to pretend I am just fine with my body as it is. I don’t hate myself in the way society would have me hate myself, but I hate how the world all too often responds to this body. 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 ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away. Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it. That is a staggering number, but at one point, that was the truth of my body. To tell you the story of my body, do I tell you how much I weighed at my heaviest? Do I tell you that number, the shameful truth of it always strangling me? At my heaviest, I weighed 577lb, or over 41st, at 6ft 3in.
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