I wouldn't generally call a book that covers a person's account of their own life from childhood until point-of-writing a memoir - to me that would be an autobiography. Yet I think memoir's the correct term for this, as Gay restricts herself to talking about her relationship with food and weight and trauma, and as a result this has very much the strong, sustained emotional tone that I usually associate with memoirs.

It's also very easy to read. (The skill that's gone into the writing to make this so easy to read is palpable.) I don't mean that the subject matter is easy, because very often it's terrible - Gay was the victim, as a child, of a vicious crime and it's plain horrible to read about. I'm talking about the prose itself. I read this in less than three hours, I think, because that prose is so simple and so smooth and so affecting that I didn't want to put the book down. Gay is painfully honest about her struggles with her weight, about how she's treated by family and friends and lovers and strangers, how it makes her treat herself, and that makes Hunger really enormously compelling. This is the first book of hers that I've read, and I'll definitely be on the look-out for more.