I am not entirely sure about what I have just read, because this was a concoction of heavy topics that each deserved their own spotlight, rather than to be mentioned briefly without any novel or genuine contribution to the discussion. The whole essay was pointless (and about Gay's own life stories, but it lacked her usual brilliance most of the time). There is barely anything in here about either trauma, truth, or language. I know this is not a physical book, but it still felt like a money-grubbing technique.

My relationship with Roxane Gay is difficult, because I love her until I don't. She flaunts her imperfections (being a bad feminist, etc.) in a wonderfully positive way, and you love her for it. But then there is no punch line to the joke, and she ends up encouraging you to be less than perfect, to not at least try to be your own version of a good feminist, instead of settling for being the "bad" one.

That one passage about her judgmental looks towards a "very thin" person who confessed to Gay that she had experienced the same kind of body-image trauma prior to losing weight! I wholly understood where Gay was coming from, because people can be mean and people judge and trauma is anything but a clear-cut straight-to-healing adventure. But you would expect her to at least mention how judging now-skinny people is not right: you don't know anything about their story and their own trauma. She doesn't say anything about that, though, not even in passing; and really, if I were that thin girl who had poured her heart out to Gay because she thought the author of such a powerful memoir as Hunger would understand, I would be pissed.

I found it ironic that even though Gay advises against writing self-centered trauma narratives, she never truly gave me the impression that she cared about her readers.