I am one of those skinny girls who sees a little padding on her hips (because you suddenly develop hips in your midtwenties-who knew?) and starts to agonize over it. Gay's memoir is painful to read because of how real it is. Now and adult, she doesn't want to be overweight, but essentially a lifetime of bad habits have made it hard to lose the extra pounds-and then, when she does start to lose weight, the old fears rear their ugly heads again and send her back into bad habits. Her weight problem stems from childhood trauma-after being gang raped at the age of twelve, she began eating in an attempt to make herself overweight and repulsive to men because she didn't want to be hurt again.

At her heaviest, she weighed close to six hundred pounds, and while she's significantly below that now, she's still considered super morbidly obese.

Gay's memoir is, essentially, about being fat. Hunger is up for a Goodreads award, I had it from Book of the Month, and a coworker had read it it and recommended it, and so this confluence of events led me to read it.