A bestselling author and contributing writer at The New York Times, Gay calls the process of finishing Hunger the most difficult writing endeavour of her life: 'I was certain the words would come easily, the way they usually do. 'Mine is not a success story,' Gay writes early on, squashing any preconceived assumptions that this memoir is about weight loss, as so many body stories are. To read these experiences consolidated in one place, written so clear-heartedly, is to understand the exhaustion of living in a body under surveillance. 'Sometimes I have a flashback to the humiliation of that evening and I shudder.' She writes of going to the doctor only if she really has to in order to spare herself the shaming of the indignities involved in air travel of the unsolicited evaluations from strangers. 'I was filled with self-loathing of an intense degree for the next several days,' she writes. Gay and the other authors were expected to climb up, despite the sheer inaccessibility of the expectation. Gay tells the story of giving a reading at the Housing Works bookstore in New York. In Roxane Gay's new memoir, Hunger, these intrusions happen every day, verbally or otherwise.
