At its most symphonic, it’s an intellectually rigorous and deeply moving exploration of the ways in which trauma, stories, desire, language and metaphor shape our experiences and construct our reality. At its simplest, it’s a memoir about being fat - Gay’s preferred term - in a hostile, fat-phobic world. An uncompromising look at the specific, often paradoxical details of her embodiment, the book examines the experience of living in her body in the world as through a kaleidoscope from every angle, turning it over and over into myriad new possible shapes. Roxane Gay’s luminous new memoir, “Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body,” is a profound example of this theory in praxis. Not only is there no split but, remarkably, the mind “arises from the nature of our brains, bodies and bodily experience.” Cartesian dualism is officially dead, felled by the theory of embodied cognition, which holds that “the structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment.” Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.” These were the three major findings of cognitive science that put to rest “more than two millennia of a priori philosophical speculation” about the mind’s relationship to the body.
“The mind is inherently embodied,” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote in 1999. HUNGER A Memoir of (My) Body By Roxane Gay 306 pp.
