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Her relationships start out abusive and transactional and get better. In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, she met one of the first men who treated her with respect.
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Towards the end of her 20s, which Gay considers the worst decade of her life, she found herself focusing more firmly on writing. But the stoicism is a mirage: you have to take Gay's words at face value, and since she chooses to leave them unadorned, overall her pain speaks louder. She goes into minute and excruciating detail about a consultation for gastric bypass surgery, having enough room on flights and her two-year flirtation with bulimia. Gay writes seemingly unflinchingly about how her body: that she has constant bruises from fitting in chairs with arms, that she cannot buy the pretty clothes she longs to wear and if she makes the attempt to wear them, they feel emotionally constricting. At her heaviest, sometime in her mid 20s, she weighed 557 pounds. Rather than tell her family about her rape, Gay came out as a lesbian ( although she continued to date men ) when they pressed her to explain why she'd dropped out of school. At 18, Gay went to Yale, and ran away from it a year later to stay with a man she met on the internet. Her parents were confounded, which did not make Gay alter her newfound behavior or confide in her family. Gay felt the need to fortify herself after such a violation and, so, beginning at boarding school in her teens, she ate with abandon. Rarely has she written about the event as it happened, or its consequences. Up until this point, the celebrated writer often explores her gang rape at the age of 12 by neighborhood boys obliquely, in fiction. Roxane Gay's Hunger is one of the most plainspoken books about trauma ever written.
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