Gay's memoir of her body begins with the event she organized her life around: raped at twelve by a boy she liked and his friends, she ate โ deliberately, over years โ to build a body that would be a fortress, "wildly undisciplined" and safe. The book follows the decades that followed: living at a size the world punishes in airplane seats, doctors' offices, family gatherings, and strangers' comments, and negotiating the hungers underneath the hunger โ for safety, for care, for being seen without being stared at. Gay states plainly at the outset that this is not a triumph story or a weight-loss story; it is an accounting of what it costs to live in a body, and to keep living in it.
Author: Roxane Gay ยท Original publisher: Harper (New York), 2017
