Eat Only When You're Hungry

A Novel

Lindsay Hunter

- 3.2 • 5 Ratings

- $11.99

- $11.99

Finalist for the 2017 Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award and a 2017 NPR Great Read

Recommended reading by Nylon, Buzzfeed, Vulture, Lit Hub, Chicago Review of Books and Chicago Reader

"With this novel, Hunter establishes herself as an unforgettable voice in American letters. Her work here, as ever, is unparalleled." —Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

Achingly funny and full of feeling, Eat Only When You’re Hungry follows fifty-eight-year-old Greg as he searches for his son, GJ, an addict who has been missing for three weeks. Greg is bored, demoralized, obese, and as dubious of GJ’s desire to be found as he is of his own motivation to go looking. Almost on a whim, Greg embarks on a road trip to central Florida—a noble search for his son, or so he tells himself.

Greg takes us on a tour of highway and roadside, of Taco Bell, KFC, gas-station Slurpees, sticky strip-club floors, pooling sweat, candy wrappers and crumpled panes of cellophane and wrinkled plastic bags tumbling along the interstate. This is the America Greg knows, one he feels closer to than to his youthful idealism, closer even than to his younger second wife. As his journey continues, through drive-thru windows and into the living rooms of his alluring ex-wife and his distant, curmudgeonly father, Greg’s urgent search for GJ slowly recedes into the background, replaced with a painstaking, illuminating, and unavoidable look at Greg’s own mistakes—as a father, as a husband, and as a man.

Brimming with the same visceral regret and joy that leak from the fast food Greg inhales, Eat Only When You’re Hungry is a wild and biting study of addiction, perseverance, and the insurmountable struggle to change. With America’s desolate underbelly serving as her guide, Lindsay Hunter elicits a singular type of sympathy for her characters, using them to challenge our preconceived notions about addiction and to explore the innumerable ways we fail ourselves.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUN 5, 2017

"It felt like a gift, this possibility that GJ was just being an asshole again." So considers Greg, an overweight, middle-aged, divorced father who has rented an RV and gone off looking for his drug-addict adult son, GJ, or Greg Junior. As he drives from his home in West Virginia to visit GJ's mother, Marie, in Florida, where his search will begin, Greg knows that GJ might not want to be found. Over the course of his drive, Greg must also confront himself, his failures, his memories, and the indignities of later life. It is in these indignities that Hunter proves herself a particularly adept writer. Greg relishes the comfort offered by the RV's wide, plush driver's seat. At the strip club Greg visits on his first night on the road, he lets himself be led off to a side room, as much relieved as disappointed to find $20 in the pocket of his gym shorts instead of the $50 required. Though Greg and Marie have long been separated, he reflects on their early romance with shining tenderness. As the two search in dark alleys and liquor stores for their son, though, it's clear that the hopefulness of their youth has long since vanished. The novel is satisfying and, despite the straightforwardness of the structure, the prose remains skillful and refreshingly concrete, full of the grease-stained fast food wrappers that litter the floor of Greg's RV and reflect the particularly sad evidence of what no longer remains.

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