I don’t remember what it is like to feel good in my body, to feel anything resembling comfort,” she writes.
It’s also the consequences of having to live with that body.
It’s not just the gut-wrenching story of being raped as a 12-year-old, after which, she writes, “I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe.” In a world where kindness is labelled as political correctness and cruelty is labelled freedom, she brings brave, raw honesty. What she is not writing is a confessional, nor is it a diary what she is not offering is a book that takes the complexities of size and race and sexuality and reduces them to sound-byte-sized morals such as “love yourself as your are.” “This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided,” she writes in the beginning. Gay also gave something less visible but powerful to her readers, who on Wednesday night came in various shapes and sizes: the permission to not be perfect, and the language with which to navigate those imperfections. She gave her time, telling organizers she would stay as long as it took to sign copies of her book, and the long line that snaked along the aisles for that signature suggested she wasn’t doing it just for the publicity. Yet you might also wonder if a woman who has put so much of herself in the book, despite describing herself as a shy, awkward person, would have anything left to give.
“I don’t hate myself in the way society would have me hate myself, but I do live in the world.” I don’t think I am ugly,” she says in the book, about her six-foot-three frame and a few hundred pounds of weight.