Reflections on HUNGER by Roxane Gay
When the Body Becomes a Fortress
“What you need to know is that my life is split in two, cleaved not so neatly. There is the before and
the after. Before I gained weight. After I gained weight. Before I was raped. After I was raped.”
There is no such writing in our country. In Romania, we do not speak openly about rape and violence
against women. No major television network dedicates prime time to conversations about coercive
control, domestic abuse, stalking, or honour-based violence. The mainstream media reports, almost
daily, another woman killed by a man she knew. Two minutes of reading. Two minutes on the evening
news.
No talk shows. No national debate.
No former or current president has considered it necessary to address how the Romanian state fails to
protect its women.
This is the present in Romania.
And then I took a writing class with Roxane Gay on MasterClass and ordered her bestselling book. It is
not published in Romania, so I waited three weeks for it to arrive. Life intervened — work, my child’s
summer vacation, my classes. One night, I finally opened it.
Everything I thought I understood about vulnerability, suffering, and violence shifted.
“I knew too much about hurt, but I didn’t know how much more a girl could suffer until I did… The fat
created a new body, one that shamed me but one that made me feel safe… I needed to feel like a
fortress, impermeable.”
Roxane Gay’s confession exposes the danger in which women live. A danger from which many of us
attempt to escape by building cages out of our own bodies.
“My body is a cage. My body is a cage of my own making…”
She writes about a prison constructed from her own flesh. But the body is not the only wall. Trauma
produces guilt, and guilt produces silence. And when a woman remains captive in that silence, the
world does not break the prison open. It reorganizes it. It explains it. It normalizes it. It rehabilitates
her inside it.
When trauma keeps you captive to guilt, why does the world rush to rehabilitate you inside the very
prison built around you?
Gay speaks of a fracture that existed long before the assault — loneliness, a disconnection from her
own worth. Trauma does not fall into a void. It lands on ground already prepared by distance, silence,
and unmet needs.
She writes in order to return to the thirteen-year-old girl who was gang raped. She writes now because,
then, she did not feel she had a safe space or witnesses who would not trivialize her pain. The book
follows her from adolescence into adulthood, carrying a trauma that transformed her body into a
territory of permanent defense.
The world keeps asking why she didn’t say anything. But sexual violence is rarely experienced
immediately as “rape,” especially when the aggressor is known, when the body freezes, when shame
takes control. Trauma rewrites memory retrospectively. The correct word often arrives years later.
And when the word finally arrives, the world often proves it is still not ready to hear it.
The truth is, she did tell the world — through hunger, through hesitation, through a joke told too quickly, through sudden withdrawal, through that smile that never quite belonged to the moment.
The writer in me asks: What was missing that made speaking impossible for decades? But the mother in me wants to scream: What kind of world makes silence safer than speech?
I cannot say anything better than she does:
“This is the memoir of my body…”
So perhaps this is how women survive: in the tension between the part frozen in the moment of aggression and the part that continues walking, building a life without being entirely defined by that violence. That tension gives birth to a new body — a container in which these realities learn not to destroy one another.
“Healing is not that simple. It never is.”
And perhaps healing is not only personal. Perhaps it begins when we stop asking why she didn’t speak — and start asking why it was not safe for her to do so.