She didn´t even tell her parents until many years later, in change, she found shelter in food. She was only 12 when the event happened in a hunting cabin in Nebraska, where she grew up, and her catholic raising made her feel guilty about her sexual abuse. She explains, after the disturbing scene how she felt safer as she saw herself fatter. She explains in her book many things regarding her food addiction and how she got to weight 577 pounds with a height of little over 6 feet, but most crucially, she explains how she was gang-raped by the boy she liked, and her friends and food became her shelter. The book is about Roxane Gay, her relationship with food and overcoming the image of fatness but is also about adding a third dimension to the word fat that most of us don´t even bother to think about. The first thing I am going to tell about Hunger is that it is a memoir written by someone who´s had a very difficult life.

Please read that book before Hunger, but make sure you read them both. When I was reading Bad Feminist, the first piece of her writing I ever got, I felt as if I was not reading at all, but I was chatting with someone I had known for a long time.

The first time I read her I was completely taken by her intimate, friendly prose that is academic, concise, clear and very professional, but still very close. She received critical acclaim for her work and was in everyone´s mouth the entire year. Her writing is as powerful as she is and took the world by surprise. She only came into the public eye with her majestic dual debut in 2014 with An Untamed State, which is a novel and Bad Feminist, a compilation of essays.

She is a source of inspiration for us all and might be the first step into a new world of understanding. Roxane Gay was born in 1974 and is a New York Times Best-selling author, university teacher, editor, commentator, influencer, feminist and one of the strongest women I have ever seen in my life.

Hunger by Roxane Gay