Hunger (Audiobook Review)

In my attempts to incorporate more nonfiction into my reading, I came upon Hunger.

Hunger is exactly what its subtitle suggests; it is Gay’s personal story of her relationship with her body. It is about what her body has gone through and overcome, how she treats it, and how people look at it. 

At its core, Hunger is obviously about Gay’s struggle with her weight. But it is also about a lot more. It’s about how bodies can become cages or armor or both. About the trauma she faced as a child and how that affected her for the rest of her life.

This book caught and held my attention as I began reading. Gay writes about her experiences in a raw and well-researched way and loved how she interweaves other sources and cultural references with her own personal story, broadening the scope and backing up her ideas with statistics and facts. 

“What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?”

In the beginning, the story follows a more ‘classic’ narrative, as we learn about Gay’s childhood and how her journey with her body, and with food, began and why. I was very interested in hearing about how the trauma she experienced influenced her eating habits and her ideas about her body.

But I found myself continually distracted from the story by the repetition of the writing. I read this as an audiobook, which might not have been the best choice, as it clearly highlighted how many times Gay uses the phrase “my body.” I understand that at times this is purposeful and meant to be poetic, but especially in the first few chapters, it was so over-saturated that it became overbearing. 

“I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble.”

As the story went on, the short chapters began to feel more and more sporadic, almost seeming to become sectioned short stories; a few chapters about food, a few about touring, a few about dating, and so on. These explorations relate to ideas of food, and body image, but are not particularly chronological or connected in any other clear way so that they seem less and less a part of the overall narrative we started with. I often felt like these chapters could have been combined and incorporated into a different part of the novel so they would tie in more, and couldn’t help but think that the story was too long for its own good.

“There is an anxiety in being yourself, though. There is the haunting question of ‘What if?’ always lingering”

That being said, this story is incredibly powerful and important. It is a difficult topic to write, no doubt, and also to hear about, but I think that many would benefit from reading it and could relate to Gay’s story. I rated Hunger 4 out of 5 stars.