Difficult Women
Roxane Gay, 2017
Grove/Atlantic
277 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802125392
Summary
A collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection.
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.
- 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.
- A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other.
- A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer.
- 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.
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 26, 1974
• Where—Omaha, Nebraska, USA
• Education—Ph.D., Michigan Technicalogical University
• Currently—lives in Layfayette, Indiana, and Los Angeles, California
Roxane Gay is an American feminist writer, professor, editor and commentator. She is an associate professor of English at Purdue University, contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, essays editor for The Rumpus, and co-editor of PANK, a nonprofit literary arts collective.
Early life and education
Gay was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to a family of Haitian descent. She attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
Gay holds a doctoral degree in rhetoric and technical communication from Michigan Technological University. The title of her dissertation was, "Subverting the subject position: toward a new discourse about students as writers and engineering students as technical communicators."
Career
After completing her Ph.D., Gay began her academic teaching career in Fall 2010 at Eastern Illinois University, where she was assistant professor of English. While at EIU, in addition to her teaching duties she was a contributing editor for Bluestem magazine, and she also founded Tiny Hardcore Press. Gay worked at Eastern Illinois University until the end of the 2013-2014 academic year, taking a job in August 2014 at Purdue University as associate professor of creative writing.
Much of Gay's written work deals with the analysis and deconstruction of feminist and racial issues through the lens of her personal experiences with race, gender identity, and sexuality. She is the author of the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and Hunger (2017).
She also edited the book Girl Crush: Women's Erotic Fantasies. In addition to her regular contributions to Salon and the now defunct HTMLGiant, her writing has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, Bookforum, Time, Los Angeles Times, The Nation and New York Times Book Review.
In July 2016, Gay and poet Yona Harvey were announced as writers for Marvel Comics' World of Wakanda, a spin-off from the company's Black Panther title, making her the first black woman to be a lead writer for Marvel.
Reception
Gay's publication of the novel An Untamed State and essay collection Bad Feminist in the summer of 2014 led Time Magazine to declare, "Let this be the year of Roxane Gay." The magazine noted of her inclusive style: "Gay’s writing is simple and direct, but never cold or sterile. She directly confronts complex issues of identity and privilege, but it’s always accessible and insightful."
In the United Kingdom's The Guardian, critic Kira Cochrane offered a similar assessment:
While online discourse is often characterised by extreme, polarised opinions, her writing is distinct for being subtle and discursive, with an ability to see around corners, to recognise other points of view while carefully advancing her own. In print, on Twitter and in person, Gay has the voice of the friend you call first for advice, calm and sane as well as funny, someone who has seen a lot and takes no prisoners.
A group of feminist scholars and activists analyzed Gay's Bad Feminist for "Short Takes: Provocations on Public Feminism," an initiative of the feminist journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
Personal
Gay began writing essays as a teenager; her work has been greatly influenced by a sexual assault she experienced at age 12. She is also a competitive Scrabble player in the U.S. Gay is bisexual. (From Wkipedia. Retrieved 2/2/2017 .)
Book Reviews
Gay has fun with these ladies. Her narrative games aren’t rulesy. She plays with structure and pacing.... She moves easily from first to third person, sometimes within a single story. She creates worlds that are firmly realist and worlds that are fantastically far-fetched.... With Difficult Women, you really have no idea what’s going to happen next.
New York Times Book Review
The real gift to readers in Difficult Women is [Gay’s] ability to marry her well-known intellectual concerns with good storytelling.... Gay excels in her allowance for human complexity.... One of the book’s greatest achievements is Gay’s psychological acuity in the creation of female characters who are teeming with dissonance and appealing self-awareness.... In a dark and modern way, this collection celebrates the post-traumatic enlightenment of women.
Washington Post
In these bittersweet lives, Gay finds fierce tenacity that bends but doesn’t always break.... Because Gay is such a vivid writer, her stories have a remarkable visual sweep. She puts her readers there.... Gay’s women are complicated, broken in places, and misdirected.... In Difficult Women, Gay gives these often-overlooked lives color and meaning. From a ramshackle Michigan trailer park to the affluence and ennui of a gated community in Florida—and myriad points in between—Gay writes of chances missed and unexpected joy, love gone awry or resurrected, and the slivers of hope that keep these fascinating women alive.
Boston Globe
The stories, phenomenally powerful and beautifully written, demonstrate the threats so many women in reality face, but also how, whatever their situation, they have agency, resilience and identities away from stereotypes created and reinforced by men.
Guardian (UK)
The characters who inhabit Difficult Women...aren’t just characters. They are our mothers, sisters and partners. They are human. They are us.... Gay manages to capture entire lifetimes, painstakingly sketching women, the underlying drives that give them their shape and the indignities that color the lenses through which they see the world.... These are real stories about real experiences and women seeking, deserving happy endings. They aren’t victims but survivors. Gay makes mosaics out of these women, seeing them as perfectly imperfect wholes in a world that routinely tries to break them down to pieces (4/4 stars).
USA Today
Gay’s signature dry wit and piercing psychological depth make every story mesmerizingly unusual and simply unforgettable.
Harper Bazaar
[A] powerful collection of short stories about difficult, troubled, headstrong, and unconventional women.... Whether focusing on assault survivors, single mothers, or women who drown their guilt in wine and bad boyfriends, Gay’s fantastic collection is challenging, quirky, and memorable.
Publishers Weekly
(Stared Review) Gay expands her writing prowess with this collection featuring colorful women protagonists.... Refreshing yet intricate.... This work will appeal to lovers of literary and feminist fiction.
Library Journal
Gay tells intimate, deep, wry tales of jaggedly dimensional women... Be they writer, scientist, or stripper, Gay’s women suffer grave abuses, mourn unfathomable losses, love hard, and work harder.
Booklist
A collection of stories unified in theme—the struggles of women claiming independence for themselves—but wide-ranging in conception and form.... Not every story works, but Gay is an admirable risk-taker in her exploration of women's lives and new ways to tell their stories.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Difficult Women...then take off on your own:
1. What is a difficult woman? How does Roxane Gay describe her...and how do you describe her? What makes a woman "difficult"?
2. Of the various women in her stories, which are your favorites and why? What makes them "difficult"?
3. Talk about the lives Gay's female characters lead, especially their jobs: maids, aerobic instructor, sex workers, engineer. What are those jobs like? Is it the positions/roles/jobs that make women difficult? What other types of jobs or roles would qualify?
4. What experiences have you had in which you might be deemed "difficult"?
5. In "Bone Density," one of the characters says, "We play games because we can and we like it." What kind of games does she refer to, and what does she mean when she says, "Most days these games keep us together, somehow"? Are women more adept at game-playing than men?
6. Talk about the unusual structure in some of Gay's stories, as well as point-of-view shifts, from first to third person. Others stories delve into surrealism, a glass wife, for instance. What, if anything, do those anomalies contribute to the stories? Or perhaps they detract from your reading experience.
7. Brutal things happen to babies in these stories: they're stillborn, abandoned, maimed in a parking lot. Notice, also, the way Gay links violence with sex—which is a long-held literary trope. Want to take a stab at the meaning or significance of all this?
9. Do any of the characters or events in the stories shock you...appall you...or anger you?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)