Seeing and being seen is central to this work. Take that pronoun out and the clause makes no sense yet, at the same time, Gay seems to be suggesting that she prefers we look away. It’s a book in which Gay simultaneously engages in self-assertion and self-erasure, a notion that lingers in the book’s very subtitle, with the word “my” encased in parentheticals. Maybe it’s no accident, then, that this book was the hardest of all of her books to write (she tells us that up front). Her books-including the novel AN UNTAMED STATE and the essay collection BAD FEMINIST-have always had a habit of drawing blood, but HUNGER: A MEMOIR OF (MY) BODY seems like the culmination of her work thus far. When you finish one of Gay’s essays, you see something of yourself that usually stays on the inside. More than most contemporary “public intellectuals” (I put those words in quotes, not because Gay is neither public nor intellectual, but because the term doesn’t encapsulate the sum total of what she does), her essays are not “hot takes,” but are like the thorns of a cactus that looks beautiful from a distance (she’s a hell of a prose stylist, after all) but draws blood when you get close. To read Roxane Gay is to also feel, in an odd way, like you’re reading yourself at the same time.
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