Gay informs the reader of what it is like to receive constant, and often vocal, public protests in reaction to the appearance of her body, as people express anger and disgust towards its lack of conformity with current beauty standards. Reviewing the book in The Atlantic, Adrienne Green wrote, 'The story of Roxane Gay’s body did not begin with this violation of her innocence, but it was the fracture that would come to define her relationship with food, desire, and denial for decades.' Beyond the event of the rape and subsequent weight gain, Gay discusses her relationship with family, friends, food, gyms, travel, and her own narrative as a result of the size of her body.
By avoiding the male gaze, Gay as a child pursued her own safety from further sexual assault. Gay gained weight in the wake of her trauma, as both a means of comfort and of protecting herself from the world, and describes the book as being about 'living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight, when you are not obese or morbidly obese but super morbidly obese.' Gay explains that this desire for protection through binge eating began as a coping mechanism in order to become physically larger and 'repulsive' to men. In Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Gay describes her experience of her body, her relationship to food and weight, and her experience as a victim of sexual violence.
