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Update: I had to share Roxane's on the Daily Show, because it's amazing.

Holy shit, Roxane Gay has written one hell of a memoir. This book is powerful on about forty-seven different levels and I really think that it ought to be required reading for anyone interested in feminism and the body-positive movement. But also, just anyone who wants to read good writing because holy shit, Roxane Gay: How do you write like this?! It's kind of unfair.

This book was originally announced as a 2016 summer release, but it got pushed back because she needed some more time to work on it. Within half an hour of starting this book, it's obvious why she needed that time. This is one of the most intensely personal things I've ever read and it's full of so much pain that was clearly never fully processed. Writing it must have been the most difficult thing in the world.

With that in mind, reading this was not easy. It was sometimes so brutal that I had to set it down, and yet it was so engrossing that I still managed to read it in just over 24 hours.

So here it is: Roxane Gay is a fat woman. At her heaviest, she weighed nearly 600 pounds. She’s smaller than that today, but she’s still a very large woman. She sometimes feels like that fact makes up her sole identity. Which is a shame because so many people love her intellect but also obvious because that's the world we live in and it can’t be an easy thing for her to navigate. I struggle with it, and I’m only 30 pounds(ish) heavier than I want to be. I feel like the fattest woman in the world some days, even though rationally I know I’m not. I don’t even need plus-size clothing, so I can’t imagine what it must be like when the numbers are exponentially larger.

Even though Gay spends a lot of time probing the psychological barriers that have contributed to her weight gain, this book isn’t about “making excuses.� When she was 12, Gay was gang-raped by a group of boys and she didn’t tell anyone about it...for 30 years. She didn’t know how to ask for the help she needed, so she just kept it all in. The self-blame, the depression, the bullying and slut-shaming she received. The next year, she left home for boarding school and she discovered comfort in the form of food. Without any adults really keeping an eye on her, she began to gain weight. Her feelings of trauma and her need for comfort were so intense that her weight gain was rather dramatic. Her family was startled by the change, but didn’t know the psychological roots and so their response really just made her feel worse. She began to conflate her size and her individual self-worth, which really only intensified her depression and led her to seek yet more comfort in food.

This is a powerful statement in favor of the body-positive movement, even if Gay doesn’t want it to be or doesn’t seem to think it needs to be. But here’s the thing: so many people are down on that movement because, “Well being fat isn’t healthy and accepting that someone is fat is bad for them. If we really wanted to help, we’d encourage them to lose that weight.� Gay skewers that point of view so well here, even if she doesn’t explicitly intend to. She knows she’s fat, she knows how she got there, and she harbors no illusions about it. She doesn’t want to be fat and she’s even taken some steps to lose some of the weight. But it’s hard to go to a gym and get exercise when you’re 400 pounds when the other people at the gym make you feel like shit because you’re 400 pounds. She doesn’t need fit people telling her that being fat is unhealthy and she should lose weight.

It’s hard to break habits that you’ve held for decades, especially when your self-image is so tightly wound up with the way your body looks: you feel bad because of the weight, so you comfort yourself with food and gain more weight, then you feel even worse. And so much of our culture winds those things together so tightly. This bond is magnified when, like Gay, your initial weight gain is largely tied to mental health issues with other causes. There’s a lot of psychological layers to dig through, and maybe if our culture allowed people (women) to separate their feelings of value from their weight, it might actually help with both the value and the weight.

Long story short: the “fat acceptance� movement, as it gets derisively called, isn’t about letting people be as fat and as unhealthy as they want. It’s about letting them feel good about themselves even though they are fat. Being fat shouldn't be the sole thing that makes up your identity.

This is a hard, hard book to read because Gay goes into a lot of traumatic issues, particularly sexual assault. Tread carefully if you’re sensitive to those kinds of things. But there’s so much to think about in this book. It shines a new light on her previous work, it’s an unapologetic look at mental health and obesity and trauma and rape culture, and it’s one woman’s beautifully written account of a difficult life story. It's one of the best memoirs I've ever read and I can't recommend it enough.