The rape turned that child's world upside down, and she had no idea how to deal with it. Gay and her brothers were beloved, healthy, high-achieving kids. Her parents were immigrants from Haiti, her father a successful civil engineer, her mother a stay-at-home mom. Before it, she was 'a good Catholic girl' growing up in a Midwestern suburb.

That assault is the dividing line in her life.

She knows exactly when and why she got fat: at age 12, after she was brutally gang-raped, a crime organized by a boy she thought was her friend. Our culture ruthlessly shames fat people, Gay writes, and makes assumptions about why they're fat: that they're lazy, stupid, self-indulgent, even immoral. In Hunger, she fearlessly delves into why we react that way - and why she got that way in the first place. She begins the book by describing a consultation some years ago at a bariatric surgery clinic when she was at her top weight: 577 pounds.ĭid you flinch when you read that? She knows you did. Make no mistake, Gay writes, she is not a little overweight, carrying an extra 20 or 30 pounds on her 6-foot-3 frame.