Lines such as, “I am always uncomfortable or in pain,” leave you no wiggle room to turn away from empathy. There’s something about honesty this bare – you cannot argue with it. We don’t hold back when we talk to ourselves about ourselves, and that’s what Gay has given us here: elegantly rendered essays with the intimacy of an inner monologue. But, you realise, anything less would be dishonest.
You yearn for Gay to be a little kinder to herself as she glides through her past, reckoning with all the things she did with her body and, more significantly, the things that were done to it. R oxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body was described to me by multiple people as an almost unbearably brutal book, and it is.
