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Instead of asking for protection, she looked for a way to protect herself: "What I did know was food, so I ate because I understood that I could take up more space.
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"Of all the things I wish I knew then that I know now," Gay writes, "I wish I had known I could talk to my parents and get help." But like so many victims of sexual assault she felt ashamed, and she kept the secret for years.
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The rape turned that child's world upside down, and she had no idea how to deal with it. Gay and her brothers were beloved, healthy, high-achieving kids.
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Her parents were immigrants from Haiti, her father a successful civil engineer, her mother a stay-at-home mom. Before it, she was "a good Catholic girl" growing up in a Midwestern suburb. That assault is the dividing line in her life. She knows exactly when and why she got fat: at age 12, after she was brutally gang-raped, a crime organized by a boy she thought was her friend. Our culture ruthlessly shames fat people, Gay writes, and makes assumptions about why they're fat: that they're lazy, stupid, self-indulgent, even immoral. In Hunger, she fearlessly delves into why we react that way - and why she got that way in the first place. She begins the book by describing a consultation some years ago at a bariatric surgery clinic when she was at her top weight: 577 pounds.ĭid you flinch when you read that? She knows you did. Make no mistake, Gay writes, she is not a little overweight, carrying an extra 20 or 30 pounds on her 6-foot-3 frame.