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In this short excerpt from her introduction, Gay both orients the reader to what appears to be the defining theme of her memoir – her weight – and makes clear that her motive is not what it appears to be. After the assault, Gay deliberately ate in an attempt to make herself “repulsive” to men, turning her body into a protective fortress. Gay’s body, which, by her own description, is morbidly obese, is a memoir in itself: a record of the trauma she experienced when she was gang-raped at the age of twelve. Roxane Gay’s 2017 autobiography Hunger is appropriately subtitled A Memoir of (My) Body. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than 20 years. I’m a feminist and I know that it is important to resist unreasonable standards for how my body should look. It would be easy to pretend I am just fine with my body as it is. I don’t hate myself in the way society would have me hate myself, but I hate how the world all too often responds to this body. Of all the things I wish I knew then that I know now, I wish I had known I could talk to my parents and get help, and turn to something other than food. I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away. Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it. That is a staggering number, but at one point, that was the truth of my body. To tell you the story of my body, do I tell you how much I weighed at my heaviest? Do I tell you that number, the shameful truth of it always strangling me? At my heaviest, I weighed 577lb, or over 41st, at 6ft 3in.