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Gay describes her book as a “memoir of her body.” It’s a body that has wrangled for decades with two issues frequently in the headlines and covered by medical journalists: obesity and sexual assault. (My reason for saying “if they are able” will become apparent shortly.) I think it’s a book every health journalist ought to consider reading if they are able. It was not an easy book to listen to, but I’m so glad that I did - both personally and for my work as a journalist. I recently made an exception on a friend’s recommendation and listened to the audiobook of Roxane Gay’s “ Hunger,” as read by the author (which was important and relevant given its content).
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I read (and write) nonfiction all day long, so most of my me-time pleasure reading is limited to fiction. Someone who is obese or morbid obese is not just someone who has no respect for her body or common social and esthetic parameters it has more to do with screaming out loud there´s a big problem they cannot say with words.Content note: This blog post mentions sexual assault.
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The third dimension to the fatness problem, especially in a society like ours in the United States makes us wonder which the reason behind obesity in each case is. She hated herself for a long time and was involved in food orgies more than she can remember.There was a sense of hiding she felt very comfortable, but it was her writing that unleashed her true power. There is a special bound that is ethereal throughout the book, but if you read carefully, you might be able to catch it: she is speaking as a woman in the voice of a writer and her prose is what made that broken woman powerful. She didn´t even tell her parents until many years later, in change, she found shelter in food. She was only 12 when the event happened in a hunting cabin in Nebraska, where she grew up, and her catholic raising made her feel guilty about her sexual abuse. She explains, after the disturbing scene how she felt safer as she saw herself fatter. She explains in her book many things regarding her food addiction and how she got to weight 577 pounds with a height of little over 6 feet, but most crucially, she explains how she was gang-raped by the boy she liked, and her friends and food became her shelter. The book is about Roxane Gay, her relationship with food and overcoming the image of fatness but is also about adding a third dimension to the word fat that most of us don´t even bother to think about. The first thing I am going to tell about Hunger is that it is a memoir written by someone who´s had a very difficult life. Please read that book before Hunger, but make sure you read them both.
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When I was reading Bad Feminist, the first piece of her writing I ever got, I felt as if I was not reading at all, but I was chatting with someone I had known for a long time. The first time I read her I was completely taken by her intimate, friendly prose that is academic, concise, clear and very professional, but still very close. She received critical acclaim for her work and was in everyone´s mouth the entire year. Her writing is as powerful as she is and took the world by surprise. She only came into the public eye with her majestic dual debut in 2014 with An Untamed State, which is a novel and Bad Feminist, a compilation of essays. She is a source of inspiration for us all and might be the first step into a new world of understanding. Roxane Gay was born in 1974 and is a New York Times Best-selling author, university teacher, editor, commentator, influencer, feminist and one of the strongest women I have ever seen in my life.