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When are bodies are broken, we are broken and we cannot simply detach ourselves from that brokenness and move on. Instead, it was almost a badge of honor for these “men of the mind.” I don’t think women have that same luxury.įinally, and I guess this is the most important point, I think women struggle constantly between not wanting to be defined by our bodies–and we separate our “selves” from our “bodies” in this effort–and knowing that, in some fundamental way, we are our bodies, and our bodies are integral to who we are: we cannot love ourselves fully if we don’t love our bodies. Do men worry about their appearance when they walk into a classroom for the first time, or are they able to trust their wisdom, and their power? I had many male professors who seemed to relish in their complete indifference to their appearance–and they never were suffered for it they weren’t judged negatively.
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I worried that if they didn’t like me, they would make fun of me, mocking my weight, and I was not all sure how to make them like me when I felt so very unlikable, and always had.” I admit that I worry about my appearance, too, in the classroom and I feel somehow that my intellect isn’t enough.
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She said, “What I feared was my appearance and what would think of me. Gay also talked about her first day of teaching. Men do this to women, and we do it to each other, too. She talked about how fat bodies are the subject of public discourse, but I think this is true in many ways for women’s bodies in general: all the time, every day, in every situation, our bodies are observed, evaluated and we are judged in toto solely on their appearance.
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I am not overweight, but I certainly could relate to many things that she said. Is there ever a neat story-line when it comes to our bodies? A phrase that she uses over and over in the book is, “I don’t know why I did/said/felt X… Or I do.” It really emphasizes those inner tensions she feels about her body, and the role of women’s bodies in society in general and it feels very raw and honest–there is no neat story-line here. She says that what she knows and what she feels are different things. I think what I appreciated most about the book is her open wrestling with contradictions: the contradictions she feels about her body (she feels both invisible and hyper-visible) the contradictions she feels about other women’s bodies (she is both envious and angry at the thin women she sees at the gym, and also sympathetic toward the way all women are judged by their bodies) the contradictions she experiences in trying to lose weight and then working to gain it back and the contradictions she feels in rejecting wholeheartedly society’s attempt to equate happiness with thinness and her almost involuntary belief that perhaps that equation might be true after all. I was a mess and then I grew up and away from that terrible day and became a different kind of mess–a woman doing the best she can to love well and be loved well, to live well and be human and good” (302). This brief paragraph at the end of the book really sums up the whole: “When I was twelve years old I was raped and then I ate and ate and ate to build my body into a fortress.
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So, the “hunger” of the title is literal, but even more, it is figurative: she hungers for many, many things, of which food is by no means the most important. Mostly I want to talk about Hunger–as the subtitle states, it is “A Memoir of (My) Body,” more specifically, the fat body (her words) she has deliberately and intentionally created over time in order to protect her from the experience/memory/trauma of being gang-raped at age 12. It isn’t quite right to call reading them “pleasure”–they both were hard to read, especially Hunger, but they both were definitely worth the time and effort. One of the best parts of vacation is the extra time I have for pleasure reading and this trip I brought along two books by Roxane Gay.