Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay is a writer you must pay attention to. It is rare for a writer to successfully publish across all forms of the craft but Roxane Gay is that rare breed. When she writes, you sit up and take notice.
For me, the entry point has been her cultural commentary and reviews. She can straddle high and low culture seemingly effortlessly. As a fellow watcher of the Starz adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series of novels, Gay’s reviews for Wired were a must read. And her rumination on the power of Beyoncé’s message in Lemonade was profound.
For my high school daughter her non fiction collection of essays, Bad Feminist, is the voice of a woman who's speaks her truth, who understands the complicated charge being a feminist actually is.
Her accessibility to the non literary set via publications as demographically diverse as The New York Times and Buzzfeed, is matched by her prolific presence in the literary firmament with her own short stories as well as reviews appearing in Guernica and The Rumpus amongst others. Her debut novel, An Untamed State, is being made into a movie, and she was tapped to be lead writer for the Marvel comic series, The World of Wakanda.
Not only can Roxane Gay write, she can, it seems, write anything when she puts her mind to it.
Her latest collection of short stories, Difficult Women, was on many a holiday wishlist and it lands with a punch. A punch to the gut. The stories are about women of all sorts, black, white, some privileged, many poor. Mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, partners. It is not the women who are “difficult” it is their lives and usually the men in them. What unites the stories is the underlying sense of pain and violence. The physical pain and violence of sexual assault. But also the emotional pain and violence of loss, the loss of a child, the loss of innocence, the loss of identity.
I Will Follow You and I Am A Knife are both stories that starkly examine the bonds that bind sisters in times of adversity. I Am Cain is a rueful look at how identical twins can be so connected yet so individual. There is humor sprinkled through the book, nowhere more than her title story, Difficult Women, a glossary that attempts to femsplain the labels attached to so many women: Loose Women; Frigid Women; Crazy Women; Mothers. But beware, the knockout punch she lands at the end.
Strange Gods is a testament to the endurance of a woman who has survived an unspeakable assault as a pre-teen, something Gay herself endured. “I came home a completely different person,” she has said about that event. This story provides some insight into the impact of such a brutal event.
Gay is most surefooted when she is writing about the inner worlds of these women, their immediate lives and the impact of singular events in those lives.
In much of her non-fiction writing she is an astute political commentator and she tantalizes with her story in this collection, Noble Things. The setting is the second secession of the South and the new Civil War, where Anna, the daughter-in-law of a Southern war hero, sends her son north because “Anna wasn’t going to have any child of hers learning the kind of nonsense they were teaching in the South.” The absence of her son consumes her in a country that she no longer recognizes.
“Once there was an election and small-minded people couldn’t handle the man who won and then there was anger and then there were petitions and then terrible decisions were made—demands for secession, refusals from Washington, rising tensions, a war to bring secession about, the wall erected, everything going to hell on only one side of the wall, dulling whatever victory was to be had. It all happened so fast, it hardly seemed real, until the war began and it was too real and then the war ended and nothing had been saved, which was always the case when foolish mend made foolish, prideful decisions.”
There is so much more I wanted to know about this new land and how Anna would ultimately reconcile her situation, this is the the one story that I felt had a lot more to say.
As painful as so many of the stories of Difficult Women were, I found myself unable to stop reading them. Gay writes with an urgent fierceness that reflects the lives of so many women. Women who are striving to live their best lives, yet struggling to untangle themselves from the hold that so many men have on them. You find yourself willing them on, admiring their resilience and hoping that ultimately the relationships they end up in are ones they have the strength to define themselves.
Before You Read:
Length: 272 pages
Genre: Fiction, Short Stories
Themes: relationships, resilience, violence, dark humor
Commitment: Not a long read, but it is deep. You'll want to stop and reflect after each story
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