Kasey Jueds's Reviews > Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

The honesty and subject matter of Hunger feel so important. I imagine - I hope - the book will change the way I think and feel and am in the world. One of my favorite sections appears at the very end: the chapter in which Roxane Gay details how much she's struggled, and is struggling, to accept her own body, and how that struggle has helped (and is helping) her to accept other bodies, other lives; in a beautifully understated way, she's describing the growth of her own compassion. I feel so strongly that's something art, at its best, can do for us: it can help us grow in compassion. I'm glad to have read Hunger for that reason (and for others too). Some reviewers have mentioned that the book is repetitive. That was my experience, too - occasionally, the repetition helped to deepen my understanding and felt sense of the book, but more often it didn't. Roxane Gay describes, several times, how difficult it was for her to write Hunger, and I wonder if the repetitiveness is a product of that difficulty. On the other hand, I admire what feel like the rough edges in the book: Gay says over and over that she isn't "healed" and that it isn't a book about magically overcoming trauma and becoming an entirely other (thinner) self. For the courage it must have taken to write the book and for what it shares and teaches: again, Hunger feels important.