![hunger roxane gay fresh air hunger roxane gay fresh air](https://img.apmcdn.org/9a711af331113b40ffdbc46ff4bf2f5484afc3fb/uncropped/ebf08c-20210115-the-avalanches-we-will-always-love-you-1400.jpg)
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.
![hunger roxane gay fresh air hunger roxane gay fresh air](https://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/h/hunger/9780062362599_custom-0377b1bc23661bde05c5a2de1bccda661b0526d7-s300.jpg)
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.
![hunger roxane gay fresh air hunger roxane gay fresh air](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1200x675/p073f64c.jpg)
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.