I thought, This is how I am spending my summer vacation. Everything was slick, expensive wood, marble. In the clinic, the air was frigid and antiseptic. Outside, it was hot and muggy and lushly green. My father went with me to Cleveland Clinic. I don't know how I let things get so out of control, but I do. I learned of the number at a Cleveland Clinic in Weston, Florida. That is a staggering number, one I can hardly believe, but at one point, that was the truth of my body. To tell you the story of my body, do I tell you how much I weighed at my heaviest? Do I tell you that number, the shameful truth of it always strangling me? Do I tell you I know I should not consider the truth of my body shameful? Or do I just tell you the truth while holding my breath and awaiting your judgment?Īt my heaviest, I weighed 577 pounds at six feet, three inches tall. This is a book about learning, however slowly, to allow myself to be seen and understood. This is a book about my body, about my hunger, and ultimately, this is a book about disappearing and being lost and wanting so very much, wanting to be seen and understood. This is not a story of triumph, but this is a story that demands to be told and deserves to be heard. People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions.
This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided. These are the ugliest, weakest, barest parts of me. Determination, though, has not gotten me very far. I am determined to be more than my bodywhat my body has endured, what my body has become. I am in search of that kind of strength and willpower. I wish I had the kind of strength and willpower to tell you a triumphant story. I've been forced to look at my guiltiest secrets. Of my body I was forcing myself to look at what my body has endured, the weight I gained, and how hard it has been to both live with and lose that weight. And what could be easier to write about than the body I have lived in for more than forty years? But I soon realized I was not only writing a memoir When I set out to write Hunger, I was certain the words would come easily, the way they usually do.
Instead, I have written this book, which has been the most difficult writing experience of my life, one far more challenging than I could have ever imagined. I wish I could write a book about being at peace and loving myself wholly, at any size.
I wish, so very much, that I could write a book about triumphant weight loss and how I learned how to live more effectively with my demons. I don't have any powerful insight into what it takes to overcome an unruly body and unruly appetites. This is not a book that will offer motivation. There will be no picture of a thin version of me, my slender body emblazoned across this book's cover, with me standing in one leg of my former, fatter self's jeans. The story of my body is not a story of triumph. Here I offer mine with a memoir of my body and my hunger. Pedagogical scholars may be able to find use in one of the arguments I make in this thesis: that memoir is a useful teaching tool because it is both hyper-personal and universal.Every body has a story and a history. Literary scholars may be able to use the findings of this thesis to further interrogate the troubling systems America has created an upheld for women who are both fat and Black by analyzing other memoirs for their language and structure in addition to their content. I ague that Gay’s memoir is a subversion of the typical weight-loss memoir and is instead a social commentary on the ways trauma lives and manifests in the body, as well as the way American society dictates what trauma is and how Black women, specifically, should handle it. Also, this these works to highlight the usefulness of the memoir genre as teaching tool in classrooms with students of all ages. Among other things, this thesis attempts to draw a connection between Deborah King’s concept of multiple jeopardy and the lived experiences of several different traumas. This thesis uses the language and structure of Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, in tandem with other works of literature, to examine the relationship between Blackness, fatness, womanhood, and trauma.