Sexual assault is not about sex, but about power. This desire to regain control of one’s own limbs after a traumatic incident. I also thought boys don’t like fat girls.” “I definitely thought, if I’m bigger, I’ll be safer because I’ll be able to fight those boys better. Her weight itself has never been the problem.For Gay, trauma manifested in a deliberate manipulation and transformation of her own body into a size she once believed would deter the lasciviousness of predatory young men. Most memoirs like hers present a glamorous image of “overcoming” obesity as Gay demonstrates in this introduction, this is not her motive. Gay initially seems to make her weight the focus of her introduction, but by sharing, not withholding, this “shameful,” “strangling,” “staggering” information, she strips it of its importance. Although the truth of her highest weight may be “shameful” to her, she refuses to hide it, simply because the number itself is not central to her story. By posing what appears to be a rhetorical question (“Do I tell you that number?”) but then defiantly answering it (“that was the truth of my body”), she subverts the reader’s expectations. Gay makes this distinction in the first pages of her memoir. It is a result of one trauma and the cause of another. Although much of the memoir is concerned with the effects on Gay’s weight on her life – strangers taking food out of her shopping cart the humiliation and discomfort of struggling to fit into airplane seats a boyfriend encouraging her later development of bulimia nervosa because she is at least “working on her problem” – her weight is always secondary. Her obesity will not be the focus of this book.
In this short excerpt from her introduction, Gay both orients the reader to what appears to be the defining theme of her memoir – her weight – and makes clear that her motive is not what it appears to be. 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.