Hunger is Roxane Gay's memoir of her body, and of the violence and the hunger that shaped it. Its central revelation is stated plainly early on: when she was twelve, a group of boys, including one she thought she loved, raped her in the woods. Afterward, unable to tell her family, she began to eat, consciously and unconsciously building a larger body as a kind of fortress that might make her undesirable and therefore safe. The book follows the long aftermath, through adolescence, college, and adulthood, as her weight rose to a peak of 577 pounds. Written in short, numbered chapters that circle back on themselves, Hunger refuses the familiar arc of the weight-loss narrative, with its triumphant before-and-after. Instead Gay describes, with unsparing candor, what it is like to live in a very large body in a world built for smaller ones: chairs with arms, airplane seats, stares and comments from strangers, condescending doctors, and the cultural spectacle of shows like The Biggest Loser. She is frank about self-loathing, desire, relationships, family love, and the ways trauma reorganizes a life. Gay, a Haitian-American writer and professor already known for the essay collection Bad Feminist and her fiction, brings both a critic's eye and a confessional voice to the material. The result is a book about trauma and recovery that is also a sharp cultural critique of how women's bodies, and fat bodies in particular, are policed and judged. It is a difficult, honest, and important book for readers interested in memoir, feminism, and the politics of the body.