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Many of the chapters in Hunger first appeared online on xoJane, GOOD, and The Toast, and are reproduced here almost unchanged. But a critique of her style would be elitist and pointless-her many fans love her regardless, and her work does not ask to be read as literary. She writes flat, unshowy sentences: When it works, there’s an enjoyable clarity and impassiveness to her delivery when it doesn’t, it’s mundane and repetitive. Although warm and accessible, her prose is also uneven, bland, and cliché-prone.
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The closest equivalent to the book’s tone is that of a ghostwritten celebrity autobiography: gossipy and full of minute and sometimes banal detail.
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Gay presents these ideas with a light touch. At one point, she visits a clinic where a surgeon recommends brutal and expensive stomach-stapling surgery that leaves patients “nutrient-deprived for the rest of our lives.” She declines, but the anecdote makes clear that the so-called obesity epidemic is a phantasmic problem, conjured up mostly by cultural anxieties fat people are not offensive to others because they are unhealthy, but because their bodies are, as Gay puts it, “unruly.” Fat people’s mental and physical well-being often becomes collateral damage to a neoliberal conception of the ideal body as both perfectly healthy and subject to endless improvement. I see the pattern of bruising inching from my waist down to my midthigh.” A common perception of fat as a moral failing, combined with an equally widespread ignorance of or even contempt for fat people’s accessibility needs, frequently leaves Gay feeling unable to so much as voice her discomfort. Even everyday objects are rendered hurtful: “I cram my body into seats that are not meant to accommodate me. In Hunger’s most striking passages, Gay vividly describes her experiences of moving through a bitterly fatphobic world, where fat people are vulnerable to insult and assault not only by strangers but also close relatives, lovers, and doctors. Black commends Gay for her courage to speak openly about her weight, but finds that Gay’s liberal politics blind her to the systemic nature of fatphobia and make her too wary of collective political struggle. In the just-released summer issue of Bookforum, Hannah Black reviews Roxane Gay’s soon-to-be-published memoir Hunger, which is about Gay’s experience of being fat in a world that reviles fat people.