She writes about rape and its aftermath with such wounded, intelligent anger that a crime we are used to seeing primarily in sensational form on television becomes our reality as well as hers. Gay writes of extreme obesity with such candor and energetic annoyance that her frustration with herself and with the world around her attains universality. On the contrary, the movement of her thought and prose is open and expansive. Gay describes herself as 'self-obsessed,' but she has written a memoir that never slides into narcissism. Hunger is a walk in Gay’s shoes, a record of the private pain of the endless and endlessly mundane inconvenience of travel through a world set up for people who move through the world differently than you do.

There is no successful therapy or diet or life-affirming meditation practice in Hunger. Nor does she indulge in the promise of improvement or even inspiration. Confessional memoirs often seem to spring from a hope that when a writer shares a painful experience, readers will not only be informed, they will be inspired to overcome their own pain. New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health.