If the events in the narrative of her memoir don’t occur in the writer’s present, as they don’t in Hunger, Gay is still analyzing in the present, as herself - a live performance, or as close to live as a book can get. The best of Gay’s nonfiction is distinctly first-person, which makes each publication feel like a holiday mass-email from a distant and fascinating relative. Her oldest fans have been picking up new installments of her life story for several decades in the form of blog posts, articles in The Butter, and her column in the New York Times. Taken together, it forms a kind of thematic series.
Gay’s autobiographical canon is extensive and spans multiple media and genres. Gay’s customary frankness is made all the more impressive by her disinterest in painting herself as brave or special in her experiences her courage is the sort that enumerates fears rather than hiding them. She unpacks over forty years of bodily memories, laying each recollection out to be examined with honesty and grace, shying away from neither her anger nor her shame. In tender, explosive prose, Gay writes of the systemic medical dismissal and the social and sexual ostracism that trail bodies like hers throughout a lifetime. Roxane Gay’s first book-length memoir, Hunger, is about space: the space that certain bodies are allowed to occupy, and the world’s response when they are unable or unwilling to fit inside it.
