Fat, and being hated for it

Aditi Garg

Have you ever felt that being invisible would be a blessing so that you could escape the judging stare of people? What is a normal body and who gets to define it? Imagine those around us we fail to acknowledge but who are going through agony every living moment because we, as a society, make the world a terrible place for them to live in — both consciously and subconsciously. 

With so much premium on looks and appearances, those who don’t fit into a defined box are labelled and seen as freaks. We feel it is our right, rather our duty, to remind them that they need to be the best version of themselves as if the version they are now has no business to exist. Sometimes under the guise of being worried about their health, at other times to tell them it would work wonders for their confidence. Especially those who are overweight tend to find themselves at the receiving end of much unsolicited advice, barbs and more. Roxane Gay, an author of repute, shows how exceedingly excruciating it can be to be of a big size. Not just society, you feel alienated from your loved ones too.

In this moving and harshly real memoir, Gay talks about her hate relationship with her body as she couldn’t develop any semblance of love for it. Widely acclaimed for her New York Times bestseller Bad Feminist, a Dayton Peace Prize finalist  for An Untamed State, and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti, Gay is a talented writer with a powerful voice. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and has also written for Time and the Los Angeles Times. She authors the World of Wakanda for Marvel and has had her fiction selected for various anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories 2012 and The Best American Mystery Stories 2014. 

In Hunger, she writes about what it really means to be a woman of colour who is big as well. As a tall person, who has been big most of her life, she expresses how she longs to be invisible to escape looks that range from anger, to concern, to pity and disgust. It all started with the one episode that derailed her life as it could have been. It was the trauma from that episode that set her up to eat to make herself big and unattractive enough to be safe in her body. She has since struggled to come to terms with her body. 

All around the loud message from society is that women must be small and take up as little place as possible. She firmly believes that just because the weight-loss industry thrives on creating facts and figures to support their interests and creates an image of what good women look like, women everywhere continue to hunger. It is this body image that stops her from feeling entitled to enjoy the smallest pleasures like painting her nails, putting on makeup and dressing up, as she feels it opens her up to ridicule and judgement of a society biased towards a set body type. Even though she longs for all the same things that other women do, she denies herself these pleasures for she feels these are too audacious for her; as if the whole world is turning to her to ask — how dare she. 

She is scared to eat publicly and once even had to squat while pretending to sit for two hours because the chair offered to her was a few sizes too small and creaking. It is as if how much ever she may deny herself, it is never enough. It is this feeling that she can only truly ever be comfortable with people who love and understand her. Even though her family loves her, it doesn’t completely understands her and that makes her feel really lonely. With time she has made peace with a lot of things in her past and is moving towards accepting her body. Sometimes, she even stops worrying about opinions of others. She has discovered love and acceptance in her family as well and continues to heal. 

A beautifully written book, it expresses the insecurities and the dark nooks and crannies that exist within an overweight person, who doesn’t ask for too much just that he/she be accepted as a person. She tells her story with so much heart that you wish to reach out to all those around you who you have given unsolicited advice in the past and accept them for who they are. Not who they could be.