Some readers found this book boring because it just repeated the same things over and over. And for an obese personan obese woman of colorRoxane Gay’s memoir is chronic and endemic, and it’s deeply disturbing and can feel the reader with hopelessness. Years upon years of the same BS, neverending. Sometimes, trauma looks like decades of just eating, chatting online, the same list of stupid choices, failed jobs and grades, evictions, severed relationships, and the same relationships that hurt someone the first time the trauma happened. That resolution, though?sometimes it never shows up. Trauma follows and manifests over and over again, however the brain makes it until the person is able to resolve it.
Yes, it is redundant because trauma doesn’t just go away. It’s not about the reader and really whatever they’re hoping to get out of it Roxane is showing us the very experiences that closely reflect those similar to her. This memoir reads as a practice in pure catharsisan attempt at validating her own traumas and seeing how it latched onto her and changed her perception of herself. She’s not here to teach us a moral, or to leave us feeling empowered in our obesity, or giving anyone a sense of moral high ground. I’m wondering if those who got nothing out of this really missed the point of what Roxane’s memoir is. Some moments mirrored my own, and some situations I couldn’t even begin to imagine myself in. I lived this life, in my own waysso much of it was terribly familiar to me. I read a life that seemed very similar to mine at a certain point I even felt a sting of annoyance that someone wrote down my story and got the success that I probably could’ve had a long time ago. I get it and I felt myself bearing down and then a dull sense of disturbance fill my stomach as I got closer to what I knew lived in the pages of this memoir. I am also obese and have experienced the fear of losing weight for the same reasons the author has and does. When I started reading Hunger, I knew I was going into a memoir that was probably going to feel very uncomfortable both in just reading about the real trauma a real person had experienced, and the fact that I have also suffered trauma. Calling this book amazing feels like a lie. Or the 5-star ratings that praise this as though it’s this suspenseful and emotionally captivating readwhich I personally feel is misleading and such a misrepresentation of why this book exists. Like wisdom always feels good or something. Like it’s meant to be some kind of fairy tale, or the lesson to be learned is meant to leave the reader feeling accomplished and good. I’ve read 1-star ratings calling it boring, disappointing, circular, with no light at the end of the tunnel the memoir of a very unlikable human being who gets nowhere in this book. I think this book left people confused on either end of the spectrum, in different ways. That is my own measly opinion, of course.