Gay shows us little moments that we normally would not notice or wouldn’t get to see, like when a couple watches and discusses a documentary about overweight people. One thing I love about these stories is that there is no small talk it’s some of the most honest dialogue I've heard. There were a couple of stories where women liked being physically hurt by men, and those were hard to read or understand. A couple of stories, including the title story, “Difficult Women,” just seemed too damn short and choppy. The stories about assault and those about motherhood touched me the most. Here is a list of words that come to mind when I think of this collection: pain, loss, grief, guilt, loneliness, fear, isolation, sadness, emptiness, and violence.īut now that I’ve made this sound like a total downer, let me say that I just loved this book. Sexual abuse, abduction, fatness, mothers who lose children, and women who want rough sex are some of the themes. And even though many of the characters are broken, there is not a “poor me” victim-y feel at all. They have difficulties, but they aren’t difficult. But here, these women have had their boats rocked. When I think of difficult women, I think of women who are generally a pain, who are sassy, who rock the boat.

I’d love to hear why Gay titled the book Difficult Women. Don’t fret-it’s not too graphic and it’s not porn, it’s just there.

No, no, no, not every woman is sad, and not every single story is about sex, but that’s the impression it left me. From a girls’ fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July.ĭifficult Women could have easily been titled Sad Women or Sad Women Having Sex. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A pair of sisters, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and must negotiate the elder sister's marriage. The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. Gay returns with Difficult Women, a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection. Award-winning author and powerhouse talent Roxane Gay burst onto the scene with An Untamed State and the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial).

Difficult women by roxane gay