"Hunger" by Roxane Gay

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is a deeply personal, heart-wrenching and powerful story of a woman whose life has been a perpetual struggle of a kind I never experienced myself. Roxane Gay was raped by a group of boys when she was only 12 years old. She then found solace in food and built around herself a fortress of a 500+ pound body.

This book undid me. I hated listening to it while driving to work and I hated listening to it on my way back home. It filled me with sympathy, pain and depressed me to no end. It also made me feel angry and helpless. Gay is very frank about the reality of her life: about our society's inability to accept people "of a certain size" and our unwillingness to give them opportunities to live with dignity and respect. Before reading this book I never thought about the size of chairs in our public spaces, booths in restaurants, or ill suitability of doctor's offices (out of all places) to accommodate obese bodies. This is to say nothing of the cruelty she has to endure from complete strangers who feel they are at liberty to call her names, stare and offer unsolicited advice.

Gay describes the way that initial childhood trauma affected her romantic relationships, her sense of self-worth, her ability to connect with others, her family life, and pretty much every other aspect of her existence. This book was painful to consume, but it provided me with a perspective I would not have otherwise had. I can honestly say that for me there is a "before I read Hunger by Roxane Gay" and "after". This book is exactly why I read. It gives me the ability to see the world through the eyes of someone whose reality has been so unlike my own. This is a must read for everyone. I gave it 5 out 5 stars, which is an immeasurably inadequate way to describe how I feel about this book.