I remember it all: “You must be due soon!” (I was six months pregnant). I tried to ignore the comments, or just take it, because that is what we are taught to do when it comes to our bodies: our bodies are public, and hence open to scrutiny. For someone who has spent the majority of her life trying to hide her body, to be small, to be quiet (my shyness was another source of unwanted comments, because being shy and quiet and introverted is almost as bad as being fat in our world), being pregnant was terrifying. I think the apex of body comments came when I was pregnant. The knowing that I wasn't enough when I was fat, or even just a little fat. And later, when I was in my twenties and trying to navigate a new career in new cities and in new places, any time I lost weight (I fluctuate with my weight, and have throughout my life) I’d get: You look great! You are so thin! And it was the knowing that those compliments ONLY came when I lost weight, never when I was just healthily living my life, that was the most detrimental for me. The awareness that I have an unseemly, ugly, protrusion of flesh has been with me ever since. And when I look at pictures of me at that time, I see nothing wrong with how I looked. I remember being very little, eight maybe, and putting on my brand new New Kids on the Block nightie, and dancing around joyously, when a relative poked me in the belly and said: “You have a belly!” The shame of having that fat hasn’t left me. My body has always been the subject of comments.
Your body is subject to co mmentary when you gain weight, lose weight, or maintain your unacceptable weight” (76). It’s exhausting.īut, “Regardless of what you do, your body is the subject of public discourse with family, friends, and strangers alike. And yet now, the thought that has usurped that refrain for me is “I do not want Amy daughter to grow up wishing she was thin”. So many-too many-times in my life I have thought, “If I was thin, I would…”. I have spent the better part of my life equating “thinness with self-worth”, unfortunately. To be foolish, small, petite, QUIET-that is what little girls are made of.Īnd yet, Gay reminds us that “it is a powerful lie to equate thinness with self-worth” (84). We should not take up space.” Certainly we should not take up space!-Not with our bodies, and not with our minds. About the littleness of our female culture, Gay says “This is what most girls are taught – that we should be slender and small. I don’t, of course, hope for Adeline to be a fool, even a beautiful LITTLE one, but that line is al most 100 years old and it persists today.
And of course it popped in my head when the technician told me I was having a girl. And of course Zelda Fitzgerald’s influential line to her husband, “ I hope she'll be a fool-that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” pervades the text through Daisy. When I found out I was having a girl, I was teaching The Great Gatsby. I also want to understand what it is to be a woman in our society, and how I can make that world better for my daughter. This summer I have been reading stories, mostly by women, as a way to find answers in my own life. And I read this memoir, highlighting most of it, my Kindle heavy with its weight, because this is a story that needs to be heard, and I wish we had more like it. She says that this is “simply, a true story” (7). She says that “there will be no picture of a thin version.emblazoned across this book’s cover” (6). She goes on to explain that this story isn’t one of “triumph”, it is not a “weight-loss memoir”. Here I offer mine with a memoir of my body and my hunger” (6). Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body begins with the explanation: “Every body has a story and a history.