But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.” In Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxane Gay shares her story with tremendous honesty and bravery, and there’s no doubt that this is one of the most powerful memoirs I’ve ever read. Terry Tempest Williams wrote in When Women Were Birds: “We all have our secrets. I am tracing the story of my body from when I was a carefree young girl who could trust her body and who felt safe in her body, to the moment when that safety was destroyed, to the aftermath that continues even as I try to undo so much of what was done to me.” And now, I am choosing to no longer be silent.
I have been silent about my story in a world where people assume they know the why of my body, or any fat body. I have tried to move on from the trauma that compelled me to create this body. I have tried to love or at least tolerate this body in a world that displays nothing but contempt for it. I have tried to make peace with this body.
“I have been living in this unruly body for more than twenty years.
