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But what does this rule of relatability do for a writer whose message, whose life experience, is the painful difficulty of relating? The answer is that it tends to compress it into an unsynthesized mass of minor contradictions, leavened by fun observations about TV shows and given gravitas by the undeniable suffering of the author. It may be true that, in order to get her message across, a public figure should strive to be relatable to as many people as possible. But a critique of her style would be elitist and pointless-her many fans love her regardless, and her work does not ask to be read as literary. She writes flat, unshowy sentences: When it works, there’s an enjoyable clarity and impassiveness to her delivery when it doesn’t, it’s mundane and repetitive. Although warm and accessible, her prose is also uneven, bland, and cliché-prone.
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The closest equivalent to the book’s tone is that of a ghostwritten celebrity autobiography: gossipy and full of minute and sometimes banal detail. Gay presents these ideas with a light touch. She writes about rape and its aftermath with such wounded, intelligent anger that a crime we are used to seeing primarily in sensational form on television becomes our reality as well as hers. Gay writes of extreme obesity with such candor and energetic annoyance that her frustration with herself and with the world around her attains universality. On the contrary, the movement of her thought and prose is open and expansive. Gay describes herself as 'self-obsessed,' but she has written a memoir that never slides into narcissism.
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Hunger is a walk in Gay’s shoes, a record of the private pain of the endless and endlessly mundane inconvenience of travel through a world set up for people who move through the world differently than you do.
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There is no successful therapy or diet or life-affirming meditation practice in Hunger. Nor does she indulge in the promise of improvement or even inspiration. Confessional memoirs often seem to spring from a hope that when a writer shares a painful experience, readers will not only be informed, they will be inspired to overcome their own pain.