In Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Gay describes her experience of her body, her relationship to food and weight, and her experience as a victim of sexual violence. Gay gained weight in the wake of her trauma, as both a means of comfort and of protecting herself from the world, and describes the book as being about "living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight, when you are not obese or morbidly obese but super morbidly obese."[2] Gay explains that this desire for protection through binge eating began as a coping mechanism in order to become physically larger and "repulsive"[3] to men. By avoiding the male gaze,[4] Gay as a child pursued her own safety from further sexual assault.[5] Reviewing the book in The Atlantic, Adrienne Green wrote, "The story of Roxane Gay's body did not begin with this violation of her innocence, but it was the fracture that would come to define her relationship with food, desire, and denial for decades."[6] Beyond the event of the rape and subsequent weight gain, Gay discusses her relationship with family, friends, food, gyms, travel, and her own narrative as a result of the size of her body.[2]
Gay informs the reader of what it is like to receive constant, and often vocal, public protests in reaction to the appearance of her body, as people express anger and disgust towards its lack of conformity with current beauty standards. She describes how just the simple act of walking down the street can mean having to deal with negative and cruel verbal epithets: "When I am walking down the street, men lean out of their car windows and shout vulgar things at me about my body, how they see it, and how it upsets them that I am not catering to their gaze and their preferences and desires."[7]
In Vox, Constance Grady described Hunger as "an intimate and vulnerable memoir, one that takes its readers into dark and uncomfortable places. Gay examines wells of trauma and horror, not sparing her own self-loathing from her forthright analytic eye. But all the while, she insists on her right to be treated with dignity."[8] Gay also addresses the concept of personal space, and how being obese has affected the way people perceive and treat her in her day-to-day life.[9] She criticizes the female clothing market, weight-loss systems and their advertisements, public figures, public transportation, and certain agencies with whom she conducts business for not conscientiously accommodating to the needs of those who are overweight.[9] She remarks how this negligence is damaging to her identity and self-esteem.[9]
