Verdict: Gay calls this work “the most difficult writing experience of life” audiences are likely to find Hunger a difficult – yet rewarding – experience, as well. Roxane Gay has finally written the book that she 'wanted to write the least. After I was raped.” Weight protected her, until her corpulence became a “cage” from which Gay attempts to write herself free: “This is a book about learning … to allow myself to be seen and understood.” Until she wasn’t: “What you need to know is that my life is split in two … there is the before and after. The daughter of Haitian immigrants who was raised upper-middle-class, Gay was smart, privileged, loved, and thin, like the rest of her family. Gay stands 6’3″ at her heaviest, she weighed 577 pounds. “Every body has a story and a history,” Roxane Gay ( Bad Feminist, Difficult Women) begins. For such a vulnerable, raw memoir, no one but the author could voice the breathtaking revelations, brutal truths, and profound knowledge contained here.