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4.3 AVERAGE
4.3 AVERAGE
Powerful message and a great author. Deeper meanings and much more the reflect on than I expected.
while acknowledging the importance of the personal story being told here, and with so much empathy for the horrific things roxane gay endured as a child that fed directly into her experience, this was very difficult to read.
aside from roxane gay’s continued self hatred for herself and her body as a fat person, there was no discussion of what seemed to me like an intense PTSD response to the events of her childhood and its correlation to both her mental health and her body as she describes in this book. that is to say, she discussed the response and its correlation, but it was never labeled or discussed as a serious post-traumatic stress response.
other than that, detailed descriptions of her calorie counting and research on how to be bulimic had me skipping paragraphs and pages bc of the intensity and graphic nature of the ED descriptions. this book reminded me a lot of I’m Glad My Mom Died — though roxane gay doesn’t owe me a neatly tied up synthesis of horrific events she’s experienced, it was largely a book about having a bad time and hating yourself. an oversimplification, for sure, but because of that i was very eager for it to be over.
aside from roxane gay’s continued self hatred for herself and her body as a fat person, there was no discussion of what seemed to me like an intense PTSD response to the events of her childhood and its correlation to both her mental health and her body as she describes in this book. that is to say, she discussed the response and its correlation, but it was never labeled or discussed as a serious post-traumatic stress response.
other than that, detailed descriptions of her calorie counting and research on how to be bulimic had me skipping paragraphs and pages bc of the intensity and graphic nature of the ED descriptions. this book reminded me a lot of I’m Glad My Mom Died — though roxane gay doesn’t owe me a neatly tied up synthesis of horrific events she’s experienced, it was largely a book about having a bad time and hating yourself. an oversimplification, for sure, but because of that i was very eager for it to be over.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Eating disorder, Fatphobia, Sexual assault
challenging
dark
informative
sad
medium-paced
Gay’s personal, pain-filled and honest voice reminds us that it is long past time to shift the cultural mindset on what it means to have “the perfect body.” I am happy to see places, especially in advertising, that this is happening.
There was a lot in this book that was compelling and powerful but overall it felt incredibly repetitive and drawn out in a way that took away from its power.
Related to so much of this powerful memoir. Not of the trauma that stemmed all of these stories but of the feeling of being other in a world that wants women small, slight and quiet.
I have never read such a raw, self-absorbed, flawed portrayal of human-hood as this one. It hit hard.