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This book is inoculated from too much criticism, because it is indeed an act of courage to write a memoir about having been gang-raped at 12 and draw a direct line from that hideous crime, in no way her fault, to her life of shame-eating her way to extreme obesity, which is, we are to understand, also in no way her fault, a point of view that I suspect will still be difficult for many readers to swallow. (I say that as someone who currently weighs far more than I reasonably should, and totally gets how outside factors like stress and emotional state get us there.)

I wonder if Roxane Gay was indeed ready to write this book -- she frames it as a difficult experience to write and finish and publish it and there is equivocation on every page, sometimes every sentence, and nothing like the stronger, more direct prose and voice of her essays/op-eds on feminism and society. She picked the hardest thing in her life to write about, but then makes a lot of loops around it, in writing that is often loopy and unsure and technically prettified/poeticized but doesn't really say what she's trying to say. That would be my response if I was editing the manuscript; it is in no way a response to her pain and suffering.

My criticism of the writing may also have something to do with the times. Roxane Gay's voice was born and championed via the Internet, which means that a lot of "Hunger" bears the stream-of-consciousness informality of blog entries. It's a highly personal form of writing, like journaling, that, in its rawness and simplicity, lacks a universal oomph that would lift this memoir up to the level of the great memoirs. "Hunger" is very, very inward-directed; only near the end does she try to lift her story up and out to the world and the reader. There's also a lot of lazy language and redundancy; many occasions where she could be more descriptive instead of just leaning on crutch phrases and forging ahead. I say that knowing that other readers will find the style suits them just fine -- in fact, they relate to it better _because_ it's such a casual, conversational non-style of writing.

But I'm picky that way. For example, I wish writers like Gay, who surely knows what real hate is, wouldn't use the word "hate" so much for banal occurrences in everyday life that we simply don't like or don't prefer: food, habits, celebrities, minor inconveniences, awkward moments. I found Gay using the word "hate" in this way more than a dozen times in "Hunger," and maybe many more (I should have counted them). What she's describing is not hatred, it's just loathing or disliking or some other, better word for a reaction. In the arts/culture section of the newspaper where I work, I find that we throw the word "hate" around, in headlines and blog items especially, when what we really mean is dislike or thumbs-down or no-thank-you. But I get it -- the hate horse left the barn some time ago, so I should probably find a way to get past it, because it seems to be the Internet's favorite word.