Difficult Women (Gay) - Book Reviews

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