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She gets on a bike and realizes that she is in competition with the woman beside her, whom she calls her “neighbor/ nemesis.” She explains, “I knew what was going on. For example, in chapter forty seven, Gay goes to the gym. Gay declares the book “A Memoir of (My) Body,” and in it, she recounts her experience living in a body that medical professionals have labeled “morbidly obese.” Some of the most profound moments in this book are mundane on the surface. She writes, “I am tracing the story of my body from when I was a carefree young girl who could trust her body and who felt safe in her body, to the moment when that safety was destroyed, to the aftermath that continues even as I try to undo so much of what was done to me.” While in the essay, “What We Hunger For,” Gay tells her story alongside that of the flashy heroine, Katniss, Hunger is unadorned. In Hunger, Roxane Gay invites us to take off the rose tinted glasses through which we see her and really listen to what it feels like to live inside her skin. And glamorizing survivors as though they are supernatural beings doesn’t really lend them anything resembling actual support. Of course, this is not what it feels like to be human. I assumed that someone who moved through the world with that much grace felt it emanating from her very center. When I saw her at another conference in Los Angeles, I was getting something out of my bag and she was walking toward the front of the room and I was in the way and I felt like I was obstructing a red carpet. Her tattooed arms bore the markings of someone who had reached into the earth, vines climbing up and around her wrists as she yanked at something underground.
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The image I constructed around her was of a gorgeous badass. Another time, at a literary event in Seattle, I hovered near a cluster of people smoking, and I inhaled greedily at their smoke because I was pretty sure that that was her voice chuckling softly in the peachy glow of dusk and I wanted a sniff of her lung magic. In Ann Arbor, I saw her read the extraordinary essay, “What We Hunger For,” from the essay collection Bad Feminist, in which she mentions that she was raped in an essay that starts out joking about The Hunger Games. I remember the first time I caught wind of Roxane Gay. This book is a generous offering to a society that may not know what to do with it. In a time when the word “healing” feels thinner than ever, affixed as it is to too many pictures of skinny, silhouetted yogis on beaches, we need to reacquaint ourselves with the severity of that process. And the manifestations of that coping can take on innumerable forms. What I find so stunning about Roxane Gay’s Hunger is that she is testifying before a society that is plagued by violence that recovery from violence may well take every ounce of courage that a person has to give. And for every unthinkable headline there is a lifetime of aftermath. But more and more of us are walking wounded. We continue on as normal, tweeting about rompers and who can wear them, convincing ourselves that we’ll collectively survive this brutal moment in history. Each one of these incidents was shattering to a whole host of human lives and yet each slips daily from our grasp. It’s not as if rescue was the end of their horror. And the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram. How is that possible?” I feel cognitive dissonance that time can move forward even though Philando Castile was about a block away from my friend Judy’s house when he was shot to death for having a broad nose. Lately, I’ll be driving or sitting at my desk at work when I suddenly remember something: “Wait, but the world didn’t end after the Pulse nightclub shooting. I have grown accustomed to hearing about the traumatic moments of our times, the moments of impact, but not so much the aftermath. His urging felt oddly naked as it hung in the air. He emphasized that the people impacted by the recent shooting in Virginia should seek psychological help. The wounds, Barber explained, are both physical and emotional.
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