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.”

In Romania, we do not speak openly about rape or violence against women. No major television network dedicates prime-time to conversations about coercive control, domestic abuse, or stalking. Mainstream media reports, almost daily, on yet another woman killed by a man she knew. Two minutes of reading. Two minutes on the evening news.

There are no talk shows. No national debate.

No former or current president has considered it necessary to address the ways in which the Romanian state fails to protect its women.

This is the present in Romania.

I later took a writing class with Roxane Gay on MasterClass. Something in what she said — and perhaps even more in what she did not say — compelled me to order her bestselling memoir, Hunger. It is not published in Romania, so I waited three weeks for it to arrive. In the meantime, there was work, my child’s vacation, my own classes. One evening, I finally opened it.

And everything I thought I knew about vulnerability, suffering, and violence shifted into a different place.

“This is the memoir of my body. My body was broken. I was broken. I did not know how to put myself back together. I was splintered. A part of me was dead. A part of me was mute and would remain that way for many years.”

Roxane Gay’s confession exposes the ongoing danger in which survivors of sexual violence live. A danger from which many of us try to escape by building cages out of our own bodies.

“My body is a cage. A cage of my own making. I am still trying to figure my way out of it. The frustrating thing about cages is that you’re trapped but you can see exactly what you want. You can reach out, but only so far.”

She writes about walls built from her own flesh.

“I knew too much about hurt, but I didn’t know how much more a girl could suffer until I did. This is what I did. This is the body I made. A massive body — rolls of flesh, arms, thighs, belly. Stretch marks. Cellulite on my heavy thighs. The fat created a new body, one that shamed me but made me feel safe. More than anything, I desperately needed to feel safe. I needed to feel like a fortress. Impenetrable.”

And when you become your own prisoner — guarded by silence and guilt — those around you often rush to rehabilitate you inside that very same prison. Writing then becomes a way of returning to that fragile thirteen-year-old girl, the victim of a gang rape. The adult writes now because back then she did not feel she had a safe space or witnesses who would not trivialize the pain that permanently altered her life. The book follows the author’s own life from adolescence into early adulthood, carrying a trauma that transformed her body into a territory of permanent defense.

“I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. Still small and scared and ashamed. And perhaps I am writing my way back to her, trying to tell her everything she needed to hear.”

Trauma rewrites memory retrospectively. There is often no word available to name the experience. That word sometimes arrives years later. And when it is finally spoken, the world often proves it is still not ready to hear it. And yet the truth was spoken. Through hunger. Through professional achievement. Through unsuitable relationships and sudden withdrawals. Through that smile that never fully belongs to the moment.

This is how survivors endure: in the tension between the part that remains frozen in the moment of violence and the part that continues walking forward, building a life not defined solely by that violence. And this is where healing begins, sometimes later rather than sooner. With compassion for all the parts of you that continue to walk beside you in this process called life.

“Healing is not that simple. It never is.”