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.
