The book is an attempt to see fat in its complexity, its contrariness – as potentially more than a physical problem to be overcome. Yet this is no attention-seeking misery memoir. “They were boys who were not yet men but knew, already, how to do the damage of men.” One reads about the unthinkable abuse she suffered – the boy holding her wrists and spitting in her face after raping her is a particularly upsetting detail – and feels as shaken as if one were directly witnessing what she describes. She drags her account on to the page – faltering, incomplete, unsensational. They were in an abandoned hunting cabin in the woods in Omaha, Nebraska, where no one but the boys could hear her screams. “That something terrible broke me.” Aged 12, she was gang-raped by “a boy I thought I loved, and a group of his friends”. “Something terrible happened,” she writes. Terrible to think of a 12-year-old child willing herself to go on as though nothing had happened A personal story, with implications for us all. We should not take up space.” But her book is a bid to take up space in another sense, to tell a story that wants to shrink into invisibility yet needs to be told. She remarks with devastating simplicity: “This is what most girls are taught – that we should be slender and small. To some extent, she is on the side of Susie Orbach. She does not duck from telling us, early on, that at 6ft 3in tall, she weighed, at her heaviest, 577 pounds: “That is a staggering number, one I hardly believe, but at one point, that was the truth of my body.” She does – and does not – know, she says, how things got so out of hand. Hunger tells a story that must have been as hard to write as it is disturbing to read.

Gay’s last book, Bad Feminist, became a New York Times bestseller and revealed her to be a writer unfazed by inconvenient truths and a champion of women – especially gay and black women. F at is more than a feminist issue – as this extraordinary memoir by novelist and essayist Roxane Gay reveals.

Hunger a memoir of my body review