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. Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body was described to me by multiple people as an almost unbearably brutal book, and it is.
