The book is an attempt at the ‘figuring out’. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than twenty years. I am still trying to figure my way out of it. However, she recognises the bind that she has put herself in, stating – I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure another such violation, and so I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away. Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it. Losing control of my body was a matter of accretion. I don’t know how things got so out of control, or I do. From the time of the rape onwards, Gay used food as ‘safety’, saying that she “…ate and ate and ate to build my body into a fortress.” An important element of Gay’s story is her gang rape at age 12, something she kept secret for decades.
Gay tracks her physical and emotional state from childhood to the present.
The subtitle of the book is ‘A Memoir of (My) Body’. You know when you first begin a book and you can’t put it down, and then other stuff gets in the way and you set the book aside for a few days, and then you pick it up again and wonder, ‘Was this the same book I was engrossed in a few days ago?’ That.
