I ague that Gay’s memoir is a subversion of the typical weight-loss memoir and is instead a social commentary on the ways trauma lives and manifests in the body, as well as the way American society dictates what trauma is and how Black women, specifically, should handle it.
Also, this these works to highlight the usefulness of the memoir genre as teaching tool in classrooms with students of all ages. Among other things, this thesis attempts to draw a connection between Deborah King’s concept of multiple jeopardy and the lived experiences of several different traumas.
This thesis uses the language and structure of Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, in tandem with other works of literature, to examine the relationship between Blackness, fatness, womanhood, and trauma.