She remarks with devastating simplicity: “This is what most girls are taught – that we should be slender and small. To some extent, she is on the side of Susie Orbach. She does not duck from telling us, early on, that at 6ft 3in tall, she weighed, at her heaviest, 577 pounds: “That is a staggering number, one I hardly believe, but at one point, that was the truth of my body.” She does – and does not – know, she says, how things got so out of hand. Hunger tells a story that must have been as hard to write as it is disturbing to read.

Gay’s last book, Bad Feminist, became a New York Times bestseller and revealed her to be a writer unfazed by inconvenient truths and a champion of women – especially gay and black women. F at is more than a feminist issue – as this extraordinary memoir by novelist and essayist Roxane Gay reveals.