It's about a willingness to die and come back from the dead, to run and be brave enough to return. It's about the things she keeps quiet to protect those she most ferociously loves. It demands that you speak up.įor me, An Untamed State is about what a woman absorbs. Not about the book, but about a ton of things I'd been bottling up. Depending on who you are, you may need a trigger warning, a stiff drink, a shower when you're reading (and after). People will tell you this book about Haiti - about another lightning rod that divides asunder: class. And though my parents raised us with the understanding that god was a god of love, I was really terrified nonetheless.People will tell you this book is about a kidnapping - about the life before for its heroine, Mireille, and about the life after. We were Catholic, and very devout Catholics. So the longer I kept the secret to myself, the more dire the consequences became for me, or the more dire I perceived the consequences of revealing my secret became.I was 12, so my fears were really that I was going to get in trouble and that I was going to go to hell, because I had had premarital sex. A secret starts out small sometimes, but then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and it becomes scarier and scarier to imagine ever sharing it with someone. I did what I was supposed to, and I think when you're a really good kid, you know how to play that role, and you know how to hide that anything is wrong. I just remember sneaking up to my room and doing my best to hide my clothes and to hide myself for as long as I could, to just try and pull myself together, and I did, because I was a really good kid. To this day, I don't know how I was able to cover up what happened. It’s the type of story that isn’t usually told, but it should be. But Roxane Gay affirms that the messages of these stories are incredibly toxic! And that’s why her memoir doesn’t fit into that narrative. And if you are both happy and pretty, then you might be lucky enough to be desired by a man and find the ultimate happiness through a heterosexual relationship that conforms to social norms. If you want to be happy, you need to be thin. These stories therefore feed into the larger social narrative that, if you want to be pretty, you need to be thin. If the author of the memoir was overweight, her story often ends with her finding “self-love” and “happiness” by achieving the thin, sexy body that society already wants her to have. Or, to put it more bluntly, they tell a story that embraces traditional values and conformity. They make us feel good partly because they tell a story that we want to hear. We’ve all read them: those gushy, feel-good memoirs that tell a rags-to-riches story.

Hunger by roxane gay sparknotes