Book Club Guide

Hunger

by Roxane Gay · 2017 · Biography & Memoir

Key themes

The body as a space of safety — and the assault that made it so
The politics of fat — what culture does to women's bodies
Eating not as weakness but as a form of control over the one thing available

About this book

Gay writes about her body — its size, its history, the assault that changed her relationship to it and what her body has meant to her and to others across her life. Her memoir is one of the most formally and emotionally direct accounts of living in a body that culture treats as wrong, and of eating as a way of managing what cannot otherwise be managed.

Published in 2017, Hunger was a New York Times bestseller. Gay has said she spent several years unable to finish it — the subject was too personal — and that writing it required a different relationship to vulnerability than her other work.

Discussion questions

Gay writes that she built her body into a fortress after her assault. How does she develop this relationship between trauma, eating and the body as protection?
The memoir is unflinching about the cruelty Gay experienced because of her size — from strangers, from the medical system, from culture. How does she render this without turning the memoir into a catalogue of grievance?
Gay makes an explicit distinction between a memoir of triumph and a memoir of honest witness. How does Hunger resist the recovery narrative — and what does this resistance say?
The book is written in short chapters and sections. How does this fragmented form serve the subject?
Hunger is a memoir about eating but it is also one of the most direct books about the long-term consequences of sexual trauma. What does Gay add to this conversation that other books about assault do not?