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Screenshot_2018-10-23 roxane gay on Twitter So Kanye is MAGA and Taylor Swift is endorsing Democrats in TN This screening o[...]

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“I had (and have?) this void, this cavern of loneliness inside me that I have spent my whole life trying to fill"
―  Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

This void that Gay talks about is particularly poignant. The idea that no matter what we add to ourselves, no matter how far we run, how much we change the void remains. Gay uses things and encounters in her life to try and ease her suffering, but ultimately can never escape that suffering.

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“It was a moment when I understood that all of us have to be more considerate of the realities of the bodies of others.”
―  Roxane Gay, Hunger

The forest is a part of Gay. It is not all of her. She is funny, and kind, and anxious, and so much more, but the woods are undeniably a part of her. The thing about the woods is that it's an incredible complex ecosystem. A series of intertwined entities that rely on one another. Gay understands this and shares with us the reality that life is not something one can own it's something we live in.

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“I am determined to be more than my body - what my body has endured, what my body has become.”
―  Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

Gay begins down a path of individual agency, and ultimately enlightenment

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“With age comes self-awareness, or something that looks like self-awareness, and so I try to be on the lookout for patterns of behavior, choices I’m making where I’m trying too hard, giving too much, reaching too intently for being right when right is what someone else wants me to be. It’s scary, though, trying to be yourself and hoping yourself is enough. It’s scary believing that you, as you are, could never be enough.”

Gay examines the nature of patterns of behavior in life, and how as we age we are more able to identify and rectify these patterns. She connects this idea of pattern finding and growth to her anxieties regarding who she is. Gay underlines the problem with self awareness. If one can identify a pattern, then one must face it or ignore it. This conflict gives rise to change and evolution. But this is more easily said than done.

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The older I get, the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires. We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.”― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body 

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The older I get, the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires. We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.”― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body 

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The pursuit of desires is infallibly human. Gay highlights the most base driving force in all people. The hunger people experience their desire for, for different, to feel full or whole is at the center of all human motivation. Gay shows that her literally hunger, her need for something more, is not only understandable, but universal.

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“So many years past being raped, I tell myself what happened is “in the past.” This is only partly true. In too many ways, the past is still with me. The past is written on my body. I carry it every single day. The past sometimes feels like it might 🤬 me. It is a very heavy burden.”
―  Roxane Gay, Hunger

Gay sees her sexual assault as the moment of fracturing in her ego. The binary opposition at play in her story, in her memory, plays a major role in the troubles that would come from her sexual assault. The person Gay saw herself as, her younger self, the girl in the woods, was incapable of handling the violence done to her and thus was lost in the woods. Replaced with a new Gay, a Gay that would spend her life searching for her younger part.

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 “I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. She is still small and scared and ashamed, and perhaps I am writing my way back to her, trying to tell her everything she needs to hear.”  ―  Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

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 “I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. She is still small and scared and ashamed, and perhaps I am writing my way back to her, trying to tell her everything she needs to hear.”  ―  Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

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Gay highlights both her disassociation with self brought on by trauma, and also her fierce belief that the cure to this trauma is lost somewhere deep in her memory. This belief fuels her deep exploration of her life, the events in her life, and how they relate change and warp one another. For Gay memory is a way back to the past. A way back to a time before the woods.