Because it is only the dead girls, Gay concludes in the title story, who are never called difficult. Taken together, the stories celebrate the condition of being difficult in the face of a world that is determined to hurt you. And the highs in Difficult Women are pretty damn high. So many of the book’s difficult women are caught in unhappy marriages and find release by having rough, adulterous sex that as well-rendered as each individual portrait might be, taken as a whole, they tend to blur.īut every short story collection has highs and lows. Difficult Women Roxane Gay Little, Brown Book Group, Fiction - 272 pages 18 Reviews Reviews arent verified, but Google checks for and removes fake content when its identified. “Requiem for a Glass Heart” - which centers on a woman made of glass who marries a stone thrower and lives in a glass house - has a lovely and evocative concept but ties itself into knots when it tries to ground the idea of a glass family in anything approaching realism. Not all of Gay’s difficult women are as compelling at the rest. The world has hurt these women, and so they act out: They are loud, they are angry, they take up space, they are unreasonable, they are difficult. The crazy woman just wants to pick up her briefcase from her one-night stand’s apartment, which is why she’s blowing up his phone with texts. The New York Timesbestselling author of Bad Feminist shares a collection of stories about hardscrabble lives, passionate loves and vexed human connection. The frigid woman runs long distance so that she can feel the power of her body. The loose woman likes men whose job titles end in the letters er. In the title story, Gay devotes herself to finding specificity in the abstraction of difficult woman archetypes. In “Best Features,” she’s a fat woman who is quietly furious at how worthless the world considers her to be. In “La Negra Blanca,” she’s a mixed-race med student who moonlights as a stripper and is constantly fetishized by men who think of her as a white girl with a black girl’s ass. In “I Will Follow You,” the difficult woman was kidnapped by a child molester when she was 10 years old.

Difficult Women by Roxane Gay