Be Bigger, Fight Harder: Roxane Gay On A Lifetime Of 'Hunger'

Roxane Gay has finally written the book that she "wanted to write the least."

The author of Bad Feminist and Difficult Women says the moment she realized that she would "never want to write about fatness" was the same moment she knew this was the book she needed to write. The result is Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.

Hunger, she writes, is not about wanting to shed 30 or 40 pounds: "This is a book about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight," she explains.

Gay traces her complicated relationship with her weight back to being a victim of sexual assault as a child. "I grew up in this world where fat phobia is pervasive," she says. "And I just thought, 'Well, boys don't like fat girls, so if I'm fat, they won't want me and they won't hurt me again.' But more than that, I really wanted to just be bigger so that I could fight harder."

The memoir is also about living with contradictions: She describes growing up a daughter of middle-class Haitian immigrants, and