Hunger

There are moments that Gay herself does not remember (and her family is not privy to), so she peruses a family album that reveals her life before her assault—including photos of her as a daydreaming five-year-old and a happy seven-year-old with her siblings. Through these photos, Gay recounts how much she loved reading; she wore dresses and play-fought with her two brothers. However, her older self smiles less and her choice of clothing changes.

It turns out, 12-year-old Gay was raped by her then “boyfriend” and his friends in a cabin near her home. This assault and betrayal of trust forever changed Gay’s life and her relationship with her body.

The boys who assaulted Gay went on to tell her classmates about the attack, shaming her and ruining her reputation. Gay’s self-esteem was left in tatters: “Those boys treated me like nothing so I became nothing” (45). She became withdrawn and began eating to fortify her body against potential future violence.

The assault robbed Gay of her remaining childhood. She felt ashamed and unsafe, retreating into books and trying to live up to her parents’ image of her as a “good girl.” She feared that if her parents knew the truth, they would despise her as she despised herself.

Gay explains that prior to her rape, she was already lonely and losing bodily autonomy. “Christopher,” the popular boy who eventually raped her, took advantage of her hunger for friendship and belonging. After the assault, Gay turned to food to ease her continued loneliness and shame. Because she felt to blame for what happened, she was unable to seek this comfort from those most able to give it—her parents and siblings. As Gay’s unhealthy relationship with food progressed and she gained weight, her relationship with her family also shifted.

According to Gay, “Haitians love the food from our island but they judge gluttony” (55). This cultural attitude led her family to express concern about her body for years. Their concern began when 13-year-old Gay left home to attend boarding school (Phillip Exeter Academy) and used food to comfort herself in the wake of her assault. At Exeter, she did not fit in with the affluent white students nor did she find solidarity among the school’s Black students because she was a Haitian American from Nebraska who “didn’t have the same cultural touchstones” (62).

After a few months away, Gay gained a significant amount of weight, alarming her parents—who tried to help but were unaware of why she gained weight. During summers at home, or away at weight-loss camp, Gay lost weight but would regain it at Exeter. A teacher referred Gay for counseling, but she made little progress toward healing. She did, however, find the vocabulary to explain what happened to her and learned that her experience was not isolated. She also found comfort in Exeter’s theater program where she became active in set design. It gave her a sense of belonging and identity as well as a means of retreat into the literal background.

When the time came for Gay to attend college, she chose Yale (in New Haven, Connecticut) for its own theater program and settled on majoring in English. Here, she turned to the Internet and found the kind of community she longed for (and had long been denied) in real life. In this virtual world, “I didn’t have to be the fat, friendless loser who couldn’t sleep, which is how I saw myself” (90). Through chat rooms, Gay learned about safe, sane, and consensual sexual encounters” and came to better understand her trauma (91). Before her junior year at Yale, Gay left to meet an internet friend and never returned. Instead, she spent nearly a year in Phoenix, Arizona where she worked as a phone sex operator—a job where she could be sexual but safe. Yet, she also behaved recklessly due to her sense of worthlessness. Gay’s parents located her, and she eventually returned home to Nebraska; however, the former continued to be unaware of the girl’s trauma.

A few months later, Gay moved to Lincoln, Nebraska where she worked a variety of jobs and lived in an apartment paid by her parents. She completed her college degree through a residency program at Vermont College, after which she was admitted to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s MA program in creative writing. In the evenings, she worked on short stories, visited chat rooms, and blogged. Though she was unable to talk about her trauma in real life, she continued to confide in her internet friends and eat as a source of comfort.

Upon completing her degree, Gay began writing copy for the university’s engineering college. She also decided to earn a doctorate in creative writing and enrolled at Michigan Technical University in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a place where her Blackness stood out. Yet, she found comfort in her doctoral program’s emphasis on intellectualism over physicality. The one thing Gay did fear was teaching undergraduate composition, as she did not know what the students would think and say about her body. She felt anxious about standing in front of a classroom and stressed over her clothing. However, Gay’s students were agreeable, and she settled into a routine of teaching, attending her graduate seminars, and playing poker at a local casino. She eventually met a local man named Jon who recognized her from the casino. Jon pursued Gay, which frightened her as she was still reeling from the trauma of her youth—but “day after day and week after week, he was good to me” (109). Upon completing her doctorate, she was offered a job at a university in Illinois. Gay wanted Jon to join her, but he wanted her to stay in upper Michigan. They parted ways, and Gay “fell back into the familiar embrace of self-loathing” (111).