Hunger, Roxane Gay, review: her relationship with her plus-size body is explored with eviscerating honesty

Roxane Gay is a superstar novelist, short story writer, essayist and cultural critic for whom the political is always personal. As such, her memoir has been one of the most eagerly anticipated books of the year. Hunger is the story of Gay's relationship with her body, which she's been building into a “fortress” since her early teens. It's a subject she's written about before, but never in such raw detail, or with such eviscerating honesty.

At the age of 12 Gay was raped. She didn't tell anyone, not even her loving and supportive parents. Instead, she turned to food, diligently transforming her body into something other than that which had been violated: “The fat created a new body, one that shamed me but one that made me feel safe, and more than anything, I desperately needed to feel safe.”

In many ways, it's a horribly straightforward tale. This one terrible event has since dictated the direction of Gay's life: “the damage was done. My course was set.” She dropped out of university, and entered into bad relationship after bad relationship, always believing she didn't deserve better. But as is to be expected from a writer who's known for her intelligent self-enquiry and eloquence, this is no run-of-the-mill misery memoir.

Society, with its impossible standards, may regard her plus-size body as “unruly,” but the narrative Hunger tells is of the only discipline, agency and control Gay was able to lay claim to. “They knew nothing of my determination to keep making my body into what I needed it to be – a safe harbour rather than a small, weak vessel that betrayed me,” she says of her poor parents' continual attempts to encourage her to lose weight. This is the story of the trauma she's carried since the abuse, of a clever but damaged woman who struggles to “believe” certain truths with reference to her own life, even when she “knows” them to be correct.

It's also the equally hard-to-read exposé of what life is like for someone who's “three or four hundred pounds overweight.” Both the physical limitations – the “reality” of which is being “trapped in a cage” – and the mental boundaries this entails. “As a fat woman, I often see my existence reduced to statistics,” Gay explains, as we live in a world that cruelly propagates the myth that, “no matter what material successes we achieve, we cannot be satisfied or happy unless we are thin.”

At the beginning of the book, she warns her readers that this “is not a story of triumph” – specifically it's “not a weight-loss memoir” – but it's actually something far more inspirational than that. It's the story of a black woman who learns to “believe in the value of my voice both in spite of and because of my body,” one who, as a consequence of what she's endured, has great empathy for others. Gay's struggle is a real and ongoing one, but the tender beauty of this memoir – testament to her bravery and resilience – has much to teach us about kindness and compassion.

'Hunger' by Roxane Gay is published by Corsair, £13.99