"I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory  of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my  body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was  safe."

In her phenomenally popular essays and  long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and  sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and  psychological struggles with body image and mental health as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as "wildly undisciplined," Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her  past—including the devastating act of violence and childhood trauma that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.

With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to find self-discovery and learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

This is not a story of triumph. It is the story of a body, a life, and a hunger that demands to be heard.