She does not accept or embrace her “super morbid obesity” – she thinks of her body as a “cage” that she is imprisoned in. Hers is not another voice in the “fat acceptance” movement. Gay wishes that she could be smaller, but for various reasons it hasn’t happened. “People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions,” she writes.”They think they know the why of my body. “I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe,” she says. She began eating compulsively after that to deliberately make herself unattractive, as a coping mechanism. I read her collection of essays, Bad Feminist, a couple of years ago and in it she wrote for the first time about having been gang raped at the age of twelve. She stands six foot three inches tall and at her heaviest she weighed 577 pounds. Gay is a literature professor, a respected novelist, essayist and a sought-after cultural commentator. I just finished Roxane Gay’s searingly honest memoir, Hunger, about her battle with her “unruly body and unruly appetites.”
