The bare book cover doesn’t give much away, so even though I’d been well-acquainted with the white space, and the partial side view of a four-pronged fork, I had little idea what this book was actually about. I’d seen Roxane Gay’s name before because it’d been attached to Bad Feminist, another book I knew of but hadn’t read yet. It comes up in searches for memoirs, which was a genre I’d been reading deliberately during early 2018 since I was writing my own. This book was not what I expected, and I think that says something about me and the kind of society I live in. Here I am, reveling in that freedom” (277). In this subdued, haunting, incredibly raw and honest memoir, Roxane Gay tells of how she’s “finally freeing myself to be vulnerable and terribly human. But as she goes through life, she articulates that it is not food that she hungers for, as the titular word might usually refer to, but something else. She eats because food is safe and her body becomes safer the more that she eats. She eats until her body becomes a defense. *Content Warning: This book is about eating disorders and trauma*Įarly in her life, someone in Roxane Gay’s life commits a horrible act of abuse against her, and Gay responds by protecting herself.
