During a recent appearance on Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show, bisexual author Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist, Difficult Women) talked about her latest book Hunger, and the ways in which society poorly treats people of size.
Hunger (which hits book store shelves this week) is a memoir of Gay’s life as a fat person.
“The bigger you become, the smaller your world gets,” Gay told Noah. “No matter what you do, you can’t fit, and the world is not really interested in creating a space for you to fit.”
In the book, Gay details how underlying issues, specifically the aftermath of a horrifying gang rape when she was just 12, contributed to how she viewed her body.
She recounted:
“My world was shattered, and I just thought, ‘I want to be stronger. I want to be bigger.’ I thought, ‘If I eat a lot, those boys won’t do this again, because I’ll be able to fight them next time. And they won’t want to do this because I’ll be fat, and boys don’t like fat girls.’”
Watch Roxane Gay’s entire The Daily Show interview below, and purchase a copy of Hunger here.
