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WORK TITLE: Difficult Women
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BIRTHDATE: 10/15/1974
WEBSITE: http://www.roxanegay.com
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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CA 361
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-roxane-gay-20170112-story.html * https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/roxane-gays-powerful-new-story-collection-difficult-women/2017/01/03/ad937ee4-d1e7-11e6-945a-76f69a399dd5_story.html?utm_term=.a77a51c7950d
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Library Journal Dec. 1, 2016, Gay” Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2015. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CH1000310577&it=r&asid=f4383383c834340d803dd69ea6761fdb. Accessed 9 Mar. 2017. White, Ashanti. “Roxane, “Gay, Roxane. Difficult Women.”. p. 92+.
Booklist Nov. 1, 2016, Bostrom, Annie. , “Difficult Women.”. p. 25.
Kirkus Reviews Nov. 1, 2016, , “Gay, Roxane: DIFFICULT WOMEN.”.
Publishers Weekly Oct. 24, 2016, , “Difficult Women.”. p. 52.
USA Today Jan. 25, 2017, Jones, Jaleesa M. , “Gay’s ‘Difficult Women’ not so easily pegged.”. p. 06D.
ONLINE
Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com (January 3, 2017), review of Difficult Women
Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com (January 12, 2017), review of Difficult Women
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com (JAN. 3, 2017), review of Difficult Women
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com (10 February 2017), review of Difficult Women
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com (1 January 2017), review of Difficult Women
Star Tribune, http://www.startribune.com (DECEMBER 30, 2016), review of Difficult Women
Vox, http://www.vox.com (Jan 3, 2017), review of Difficult Women
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, http://www.post-gazette.com (February 5, 2017), review of Difficult Women
Lambda Literary, http://www.lambdaliterary.org (January 8, 2017), review of Difficult Women
Tampa Bay Tribune, http://www.tampabay.com (December 29, 2016), review of Difficult Women
About
Roxane Gay
PLEASE DON’T EMAIL ALL MY VARIOUS PUBLICISTS FOR THE SAME REQUEST. Each publicist handles a specific genre or nature of request. If in doubt, just email me. My address is listed below.
My writing is represented by Maria Massie of Lippincott Massie McQuilkin.
27 West 20th Street
Suite 305
New York, NY 10011
(212) 352-2055
My film and television writing interests are represented by Sylvie Rabineau of the RWSG Literary Agency.
1107 1/2 Glendon Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90024
310-209-2700
sylvie@rwsgagency.com
My speaking engagements are represented by Kevin Mills of The Tuesday Agency.
Kevin Mills
The Tuesday Agency
132 1/2 East Washington
Iowa City, Iowa 52240
o: 319-338-5640
e:kevin@tuesdayagency.com
My publicist at Grove/Atlantic (An Untamed State, Difficult Women) is John Mark Boling.
My publicist at Harper (Bad Feminist, Hunger, Not That Bad) is Amanda Pelletier.
Publicity requests for all things related to World of Wakanda/ Marvel should be directed to Joe Taraborrelli.
My e-mail address is roxane at roxanegay.com.
I have a Facebook page that I haven’t figured out at http://www.facebook.com/roxanegay74.
I am on Twitter at @rgay.
My “bio”:
Roxane Gay’s writing appears 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, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, and Difficult Women and Hunger forthcoming in 2017. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel.
Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Time, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy culture blog, and many others. She is the co-editor of PANK and essays editor for The Rumpus. She teaches writing at Eastern Illinois University. Her novel, She is the author of three books--Ayiti, An Untamed State, and Bad Feminist. She very much wants a tiny baby elephant.
Roxane Gay on Writing Difficult Women and Her Outlook on 2017
Julia Felsenthal's picture
JANUARY 3, 2017 8:39 AM
by JULIA FELSENTHAL
Photo: Jay Grabiec / Courtesy of Grove Press
The title story from Difficult Women, Roxane Gay’s new collection of short fiction, is a misogynist’s taxonomy of the opposite sex. On the narrator’s short list: loose women, frigid women, crazy women, mothers, and, finally, dead girls, the most alluring of all.
“Death makes them more interesting,” writes Gay (tongue firmly in cheek, if it’s not obvious). “Death makes them more beautiful. It’s something about their bodies on display in final repose—eyes wide open, lips blue, limbs stiff, skin cold. Finally, it might be said, they are at peace.”
You likely can picture it; you’ve seen that tableau a thousand times, on television, in movies, in the news. And it’s a provocation, of course, like the notion of the “difficult woman” is, or like her predecessor, the bad feminist of Gay’s much-celebrated 2014 essay collection.
“I think women are oftentimes termed ‘difficult’ when we want too much, when we ask for too much, when we think too highly of ourselves, or have any kind of standards,” the author explains by phone. “I wanted to play with this idea that women are difficult, when in reality it’s generally the people around them who are the difficult ones.”
The dead girl is easy because she’s inert; the rest of the women in these stories are challengingly, wonderfully alive. They are carnal: Sex for them is a mysterious, sometimes dangerous balm. They have it, crave it. They become pregnant, give birth. They mother their babies and lose their babies. Many of these characters are victims of sexual assault. Others willingly court or submit to sex so rough and vicious that it’s tough to read as safe.
The violence is shocking but not manipulative, omnipresent but never the main point. The point is how these women respond to it, or, sometimes, what it’s in response to. In “Break All the Way Down,” a woman’s perverse attraction to a savagely cruel boyfriend is a distraction from the real source of her pathos: her broken love for an estranged husband and her grief over their dead child. In “I Will Follow You,” two adult sisters live aimless lives and float along into early adulthood moored only by each other. Eventually we realize that they were abducted as children, forced by a sadistic adult to do unthinkable things. The focus, though, is not on their relationship to their tormentor, but on the way their tormentor clarified and made indelible their relationship to one another.
The cover of Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
Photo: Courtesy of Grove Press
Many of these stories are woven through with strands of magical realism. One narrator’s psychic pain is keen enough that she cuts through a deer carcass with a fingernail and perform an emergency Cesarean on her sister with her bare hands; another, a miner, craves light so badly that he flies to the sun; a third, a stone thrower, marries a glass woman, then cheats with someone more durable.
Another jilted wife, conned into sleeping with her ruthless husband’s softer identical twin, observes her lover’s knuckles, covered in scars from making “miniature models of grand ideas with sharp knives” in architecture school. It’s not a bad image for these stories, each a precise, miniature exploration of the ideas that crop up elsewhere in Gay’s impossibly prolific, diverse body of work: She’s a novelist (2014’s An Untamed State), an essayist (the aforementioned Bad Feminist), a memoirist (the forthcoming Hunger), a comics writer (the recently released Black Panther: World of Wakanda), a New York Times contributing op-ed writer—and she balances it all with a healthy Twitter habit and a day job as an associate professor of English at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
These stories actually predate all that: She wrote them mostly during her days as a graduate student at Michigan Technological University on the Upper Peninsula. Difficult Woman proved difficult to sell. “A lot of editors thought it was too dark and depressing,” she remembers. “I told one, ‘That’s exactly what I’m going for.’”
She shelved the project until the success of An Untamed State, and Bad Feminist allowed her to revive it. “I think books come out when they’re supposed to, even if they don’t come out when you want them to,” Gay insists. Dark stories, then, reflect dark times? “Men write dark stories all the time, and rarely is that darkness obsessed over,” she offers. “But when women write dark, all of a sudden it’s a thing. It’s like: Why so dark? I mean, have you seen the world? It’s an appropriate response.”
We talked more about Gay’s outlook on 2017 and beyond, and about the stories in Difficult Women: dark, yes, difficult, yes, but also luminous, transporting, and totally worth the effort.
Have you ever been referred to as a difficult woman? Oh, definitely. And I have no problem with that label. If having a personality and having opinions makes me difficult, then yes, I am very difficult.
These stories were all published before. In compiling them, were there obsessions that became clear to you? I noted a lot of recurring motifs: twins; deer; knives; mold; water. Most of these stories were written between 2008 and 2012, when I was going to graduate school in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which is deer country. A lot of these themes are just around what was going on in my life at the time. To look at the stories, I can definitely see: Oh, girl, what were you doing?
But I think that writers have obsessions. Often we write the same story over and over, in slightly different ways. It means you have found your voice.
Elements of these stories call to mind autobiographical details, which you’ve written about in essay form. Are you working things out in fiction before you tackle them in nonfiction? You’ve tweeted, for example, that your forthcoming memoir, Hunger, which is about your relationship to eating and your body, was particularly difficult to write. In this collection there’s a short story (“Best Features”) about a woman who is overweight and how she thinks about it. I’m a fiction writer first. I wrote many of these stories well before I ever wrote an essay. I’m relatively new to nonfiction. So when I’m writing fiction, I’m not thinking about “issues” that I want to tackle. I have a story idea and I write it. It’s just about storytelling. I think because of my own personal interests you can see connections between my fiction and my nonfiction. I’m thinking about feminism, bodies, sexual violence, relationships, and the like. But I never have an agenda. When I’m writing nonfiction, of course I do.
Sexual violence, as you acknowledge, plays a role in many of these stories. It’s also part of your novel, and something you’ve personally experienced and written about. Rape culture, the question of representation of violence against women, trigger warnings—it’s such a major conversation now. Has your thinking on this evolved since you wrote these stories? I have definitely just tried to be ethical in terms of writing about sexual violence. Trying not to make it gratuitous. I definitely struggle with the question of how to write about it in fiction. I wrote an essay about that.
I don’t have any firm conclusions. I do know that I try not to make it prurient. It has to be necessary to the story. The reality is that many women experience sexual violence. That shows up in my stories. It’s a necessary exploration. And clearly it’s something I can’t get away from. It’s definitely an obsession. I don’t stress about it anymore. I accept it. I just remember to write about it in ways that are effective and ethical and germane to the stories that I’m writing.
There are stories in here that felt eerily prescient. In “How,” about an economically depressed northern Michigan community, there’s the line: “It has been 15 years since the mine was closed, but Red still calls himself a miner.” “Noble Things” is a portrait of a family in a future America where the Southern states have once again seceded from the Union. These stories were written long before our current political situation, but they read like responses. I think that a lot of the issues we’re dealing with are cyclical. I wrote “How” while I was living in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It used to be copper mining [country] there. When the copper dried up, the mining went away and the economy was devastated. So I was writing about the people that are left behind when an industry disappears. We saw that in Detroit with the automotive industry. We’re seeing that in the Rust Belt. We’re seeing that in coal country. It’s prescient because those things come around over and over, and we don’t seem to learn.
“Noble Things” is the last story I wrote. I wrote it in 2013, after looking at an electoral map from 2012. The map made it seem like there was a significant rift in the country along the lines of states that were part of the Confederacy during the Civil War and states that were part of the Union.
There’s all this talk now about how we ignored the warning signs that Donald Trump would win and failed to take the temperature of the country. You live in a flyover state. You studied those electoral maps. Did you have any sense that Hillary Clinton might lose? I had no idea. I really believed that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I just knew in my soul that this was her time; we had fought the good fight.
I was so wrong, which lets me know that wishful thinking is a very powerful thing. But I genuinely believed that the country was not as racist as it turns out it is. And I don’t know why I thought that. I live in rural Indiana where it’s extraordinarily racist.
There are more people who are progressive than not, but the electoral college is positioned in such a way that the power of progression is sometimes thwarted. So it was a wake-up call that we can’t be comfortable. We can’t ever assume anything.
You’re an associate professor at Purdue in West Lafayette, Indiana, and before that you taught at Eastern Illinois University. You’ve written about your desire to move to a bigger, more progressive city. Do you feel like that more urgently than ever, or do you feel any duty to stay put? Absolutely not. I have lived in rural America for the past 12 years. I’m from Nebraska, but from a city, Omaha. I’ve done my time in the Midwest. I think the emotional sacrifice required of living in a place like Lafayette is too much.
The only obligation I feel is to stay at Purdue, because there are so few black professors. I feel like black students need to see what is possible. They need to see we are capable of teaching. I’m going to stay at Purdue as long as I can, but I already have one foot out the door. I rented an apartment in Los Angeles in October. My partner lives there.
Speaking of the election: You launched your last project, your new comic, Black Panther: World of Wakanda (about two queer black women), on November 9. What was it like to have that project enter the world on that day?
It was strange. I actually had an event in my town. There are some great comic book stores in West Lafayette. I went to Von’s comic shop. I didn’t really want to do it. I wasn’t in the mood. But I couldn’t cancel with such little notice. So I went. It turned out to be great. There was a line all the way around the store, full of like-minded people who were very distraught over the election. We commiserated together. So it was a mixed day: professionally very exciting, but personally devastating.
You wrote in The New York Times just after the election that you needed time to consider where we go from here. It’s been about two months. Do you have any clarity on that? I still don’t know. I really still am—and, of course, I have the luxury of this—but I’m still stunned. Like, how did this happen? What on earth? White people: What on earth?
I think there is a lot of symbolic action that’s happening. I think that action is designed to help people feel better. And I get that. We need to feel better right now. But we also need to start being more realistic. We need to start thinking about the midterms and the 2020 elections. Because if Hillary Clinton cannot win the presidency, who on earth are we going to find to beat Donald Trump in 2020? We have to stop living in the fairy tale of: If we march, something is going to happen. It’s not. The march is a good idea because it allows people to be collective. But is that going to affect the 2020 election? No, it’s not. We have to find good candidates.
What’s been your response as a writer? I know for myself, I wrote a lot about politics during the campaign; then, postelection, have really struggled to engage at the same level. You know, I haven’t been able to really write anything about politics since the election. I’ve just been working on World of Wakanda. I wrote a screenplay for my novel. I’ve been focusing on fiction. I’ve not been ready to dive back in. I was so confident about Hillary Clinton, and I was so wrong. I have lost some confidence about prognosticating. What can I possibly say? We fucked up.
Something about the experience of being so confident and then so wrong felt humiliating, particularly because what we got wrong was in part the truth of how much of this country feels about women. Definitely. Humiliating. Frustrating. How did I underestimate racism and misogyny this much? I’m not an optimist. I feel particularly chastised because I really should have known better.
Back to your book: Fairy tales seem to be a major influence. Now you’ve got this comic series. What draws you to these kinds of allegorical stories? Do they have particular resonance postelection? I’ve always enjoyed fairy tales, both the real ones and the more sanitized versions we’ve come to know. They’re these morality tales about good and evil. I think it’s an interesting structure for storytelling.
I’m writing within that tradition. When you’re a younger writer, you work more with traditions. You walk before you run. That’s why I think fairy tales are a common motif in a lot of my earlier work. Back then I was very interested in good and evil and finding ways to tell those stories.
But it also feels timely now. After the election I heard stories of schools hiring grief counselors for all the freaked-out little kids, who saw Trump as a comic book villain. They weren’t wrong. It feels like we’re living in a world now where good and evil are that stark. Writing fairy tales and comic books: Maybe that is exactly the right way to channel what’s happening. I do think Donald Trump is a comic book villain. I think he’s exactly who we think he is, exactly that bad, and much worse.
I do think there are some people out there who are being really hysterical about what a Donald Trump presidency is going to hold. For most of us who have Internet access, and have plenty of free time to bullshit on Twitter all day, I don’t think our lives are going to change all that much. It’s the people who are vulnerable, who have always been vulnerable, who are made more vulnerable under Trump. He doesn’t care about people who have no money, no safety net, who have no health insurance. That’s villainy, I think. We have to frame it exactly as such. Because to not care about what happens to other people, it’s horrifying. It’s macabre.
Sometimes the best way to get that message across is through storytelling. We see these motifs in comic books all the time. So it does feel fitting that I’m working on a comic book right now.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Roxane Gay On Good Men, Bad Men And 'Difficult Women'
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January 4, 20175:26 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
NPR STAFF
Difficult Women
Difficult Women
by Roxane Gay
Hardcover, 260 pages purchase
"Difficult woman" is a loaded term, but writer Roxane Gay isn't afraid of taking on ideas with baggage. (A few years ago, she wrote a book of essays called Bad Feminist.) Her new short story collection, Difficult Women, explores women's lives and issues of race, class and sex.
The book opens with "I Will Follow You," an intense story about a pair of sisters whose closeness is the result of a sexual assault when they were girls. Gay tells NPR's Audie Cornish that it's both dark and hopeful at the same time.
"Despite the trauma that these two girls endure, they remain very close and they have an unbreakable bond," she says. "And I was really interested in that unbreakable bond and in how they will follow each other no matter what, no matter where, because they've already been to the worst possible place. And so that felt like a really great way to introduce readers to my stories of women who go to impossible places but are fighting to find their way back."
Interview Highlights
On "North Country," a story about a woman engineer in Michigan's Upper Peninsula
She's an engineer, which is a male-dominated field, and so she and women who are in that field are often grappling with being a professional and acting professionally and having the men around them see them as a personal conquest and as dating fodder, rather than a colleague with whom they can be professional. ... I love exploring that sort of danger of who do you trust, who do you turn to when you never know who's a predator and who is promising?
Enlarge this image
Roxane Gay is also the author of Bad Feminist, An Untamed State and Ayiti. She recently wrote World of Wakanda #1, a Black Panther prequel.
Jay Grabiec/Grove Atlantic
On the book's messed up fathers and abusive boyfriends
It could absolutely be called Difficult Men. The men in these stories are oftentimes not great men. My dad is always like, "What did I do?" And I'm like, "Nothing!" He's — my dad's amazing. And so, you know, I think it's because I have an amazing father and amazing brothers — it's knowing how many good men are out there that allows me to explore the men who are difficult, who make horrible decisions. ... I do try to put good men into my stories, but there are more bad men than good. And I guess that's just an obsession of mine.
On writing stories that show women helping each other
I really love my friendships with other women, and I have found so much solace and joy and debauchery with other women. And so I definitely wanted to put that into the book, that — for me at least, the way I see the world — that women are very good to other women most of the time.
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And now I know there are so many popular narratives and many people have had bad experiences with other women, like competitiveness and so on and whatever; but I also think that women, when it's necessary, can come together and will come together and support each other. Because I think we know things about what it's like to be a woman in the world and that common bond really is a strength.
On Hunger, the memoir she's writing about her relationship with food
Oftentimes when women write memoirs about weight loss, it's about triumph and it starts at the end of the journey. Look at all this weight I've lost. And so I was interested in writing a book about wanting to lose weight and working on it but not being anywhere near the end of that weight loss journey. What is it like to actually live in an overweight body and deal with the world that is not at all hospitable to such bodies? And so I go way more in depth in terms of physical realities in Hunger.
On why Hunger has been so difficult to write
Because it's terrifying, because I'm going to feel very exposed, because by nature I'm actually a really private person, to really be honest, and to sort of expose some of my innermost realities and fears and wants is terrifying. But at the same time it feels necessary because I just think that so many of us walk around pretending that we have it all together and that's not necessarily the case. And so I do feel like this book is necessary. I feel like the fear lets me know that I'm on to something.
Roxane Gay Announces 'Difficult Women,' Discusses 'Hunger' Delay
By KRISTIAN WILSON Jun 17 2016
In a series of Friday tweets, Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay announced Difficult Women, a short story collection, which will be her next book. Gay also noted that her highly anticipated memoir, Hunger, would be delayed until later next year. Hunger was originally scheduled for a June 14, 2016 release. Now, Gay says her memoir will hit store shelves after Difficult Women, which will be published in early 2017 by Grove Press.
Gay has previously published a novel, An Untamed State, which is headed to theaters soon, and a book of essays, Bad Feminist. Both books came out in 2014. Difficult Women is her first short story collection.
Publisher's copy calls Difficult Women "a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection," likening Gay's writing style to that of "Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July."
Gay announced the Hunger delay as early as April, when she called her book "scary" in a tweet. As the original publication date came and went, however, it seems the author was inundated with requests for more information, or — as was the case with my own unfortunate tweet — congratulations on her book birthday.
Gay responded Friday afternoon with a series of tweets explaining the layers of her personal life and public events that contributed to the delay.
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Difficult Women, 1/3/17: https://www.amazon.com/Difficult-Women-Roxane-Gay/dp/0802125395/ …
12:03 PM - 17 Jun 2016
Photo published for Difficult Women
Difficult Women
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). Gay returns with...
amazon.com
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roxane gay ✔ @rgay
As for Hunger, it will also be out in 2017, and it will be worth the wait.
12:05 PM - 17 Jun 2016
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And because people keep asking, the Hunger delay is pretty simple.
12:19 PM - 17 Jun 2016
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I've basically been on the road since May 2014, when Untamed State came out. i've had to write the book while touring and teaching full time
12:19 PM - 17 Jun 2016
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I just bit off more than I can chew. And also the book was scary and stressful to write so I procrastinated A LOT.
12:20 PM - 17 Jun 2016
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Now the book is making its way to its final form. I've gotten my edits back.
12:20 PM - 17 Jun 2016
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If the book was released at the end of this year, it would be competing with the election, and no thanks.
12:20 PM - 17 Jun 2016
Retweets 43 43 likes
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And so it will be out, most likely in June 2017, to put some space between Difficult Women and Hunger.
12:21 PM - 17 Jun 2016
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I will be touring both books, extensively.
12:21 PM - 17 Jun 2016
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17 Jun
Grammaticus Finch @briankspears
@rgay you went up for tenure in the middle of all this too, right? That's a ton of work on its own.
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roxane gay ✔ @rgay
Oh yes, I also went up for tenure during all this. (AND GOT IT). And tried very hard to have like, a relationship. @briankspears
12:23 PM - 17 Jun 2016
Retweets 152 152 likes
The prolific writer and editor also said she's working on "a secret project that will blow your minds." She notes: "[T]he secret project is for everyone BUT it is storytelling about fierce black, queer women. That's a lil hint." Sounds like it's just what we need.
Difficult Women is currently slated for a January 3, 2017 release. It is available for pre-order now from your favorite retailer.
Roxane Gay on her memoir 'Hunger': 'This is not a book about triumph'
MELISSA MAERZ@MSMELISSAMAERZ
POSTED ON JANUARY 4, 2016 AT 4:06PM EST
JENNIFER SILVERBERG
“This is not a book about triumph.”
That’s the first line in Hunger, which — like Roxane Gay’s essay collection, Bad Feminist — is fairly radical. Most memoirs about weight are inspirational, but Hunger is written from the perspective of a self-described obese woman who’s not getting thinner. “I started this book fat, and I’m finishing it fat,” says Gay. “This isn’t a book about successful weight loss. It’s about trying to change my relationship with food.”
On Twitter and her popular Tumblr, Gay creates an intimate relationship with readers by using details from her own life to explore the anxieties we share as a culture. In Hunger, she’ll reveal what it was like to grow up in a family of thin, attractive people, as well as how she coped with a brutal act of violence in her youth — two experiences that shaped her self-image. She’ll describe how her size has changed the way she dresses and even the way she inhabits public space. “The bigger you get, the smaller the world becomes, because there are fewer places where you can feel comfortable,” she explains. “You start to research restaurants to see if the chairs will accommodate you. You stop going to the movies or the beauty salon. Soon, you realize that the whole world might be your apartment, because there’s no room for you out in the world.”
Gay has found small ways to take care of herself — not just by cooking healthier meals but also by accepting her body as something that’s worthy of love. She knows that this will be harder to do once Hunger comes out. Already, she’s baffled by the insensitive way it’s being covered in the media. One publication headlined an interview with her “Chewing the Fat With Roxane Gay.” But to her, that reaction just proves that this book needed to be written. “It was putting the elephant in the room, so to speak,” she says. “People will look, but they won’t say any – thing, or they’ll say something behind my back. So I decided to stop that game and say, ‘You know what? I’m gonna talk about this. I’m gonna take control of the narrative — and of my body.'”
Roxane Gay announces 'Difficult Women,' delays 'Hunger'
CHRISTIAN HOLUB@CMHOLUB
POSTED ON JUNE 17, 2016 AT 5:51PM EST
FREDERICK M. BROWN/GETTY IMAGES
Roxane Gay has some book news for you. The acclaimed novelist and cultural critic announced on Twitter Friday that her next book will be a short story collection called Difficult Women, out Jan. 3, 2017 from Grove Press.
According to the book’s Amazon listing, the stories will cover a wide range of modern women, from a woman pretending not to realize when her husband switches places with his twin brother to a stripper putting herself through college and fending off an obsessed customer.
Difficult Women will be Gay’s first short story collection, following the widely acclaimed essay collection Bad Feminist and her debut novel An Untamed State (which will soon be a movie from Fox Searchlight starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw).
In addition to this news, Gay also announced that her memoir, Hunger, will be pushed back to 2017. She explained the delay by tweeting that Hunger “was scary and stressful to write so I procrastinated a lot.” She also didn’t want it out at the end of 2016, competing with the presidential election. So as of now, both books are planned for 2017, but Gay said Hunger will be out “most likely in June” to put space between the two. She also teased an upcoming “special project,” some kind of storytelling focused around “fierce black, queer women.”
Back in January, Gay told EW that Hunger, a memoir partially about body image, was “not a book about triumph.”
“The bigger you get, the smaller the world becomes, because there are fewer places where you can feel comfortable,” Gay told EW. “You start to research restaurants to see if the chairs will accommodate you. You stop going to the movies or the beauty salon. Soon, you realize that the whole world might be your apartment, because there’s no room for you out in the world.”
See her recent tweets about Difficult Women and Hunger below.
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roxane gay ✔ @rgay
And because people keep asking, the Hunger delay is pretty simple.
12:19 PM - 17 Jun 2016
1 1 Retweet 14 14 likes
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roxane gay ✔ @rgay
I just bit off more than I can chew. And also the book was scary and stressful to write so I procrastinated A LOT.
12:20 PM - 17 Jun 2016
Retweets 60 60 likes
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roxane gay ✔ @rgay
Now the book is making its way to its final form. I've gotten my edits back.
12:20 PM - 17 Jun 2016
Retweets 42 42 likes
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roxane gay ✔ @rgay
If the book was released at the end of this year, it would be competing with the election, and no thanks.
12:20 PM - 17 Jun 2016
Retweets 43 43 likes
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roxane gay ✔ @rgay
I also have a secret project that will blow your minds. Stay tuned.
12:26 PM - 17 Jun 2016
3 3 Retweets 100 100 likes
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roxane gay ✔ @rgay
Oh and the secret project is for everyone BUT it is storytelling about fierce black, queer women. That's a lil hint.
Roxane Gay
Born: October 15, 1974 in Omaha, Nebraska, United States
Nationality: American
Occupation: Writer
Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2015. From Literature Resource Center.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2017 Gale, Cengage Learning
Updated:Nov. 13, 2015
Table of Contents
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PERSONAL INFORMATION:
Born c. 1975, in Omaha, NE. Education: University of Nebraska, Lincoln, M.A.; Michigan Technological University, Ph.D. Memberships: National Book Critics Circle, Associated Writing Programs. Addresses: Office: Department of English, Purdue University, 500 Oval Dr., West Lafayette, IN 47907-2038. E-mail: roxane@roxanegay.com.
CAREER:
Writer, educator. Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, assistant professor, 2010-14; Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, assistant professor in MFA Writing Program, 2014--. Tiny Hardcore Press, founder.
AWARDS:
Freedom to Write Award, PEN USA, 2015.
WORKS:
WRITINGS:
(Editor) Girl Crush: Women's Erotic Fantasies, Cleis Press (Berkeley CA), 2010.
Ayiti, photographs by Nicole Gay, Artistically Declined Press (New York, NY), 2011.
An Untamed State (novel), Grove Press (New York, NY), 2014.
Bad Feminist: Essays, Harper Perennial (New York, NY), 2014.
Contributor to anthologies, including Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, and New Stories from the Midwest 2013. Contributor to periodicals, including Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, NOON, Pinch, Ninth Letter, Oxford American, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, Salon, Rumpus, and HTMLGIANT. Coeditor, PANK; essays editor, Rumpus.
Sidelights
"I've always wanted to be a writer," American author and essayist Roxane Gay told Mother Jones Online contributor Hannah Levintova. "I've been writing since I was probably four years old--it was nonsense, but it was still my little attempts at being a storyteller. When I went to college I tried to major in pre-med and architecture and other serious things, but I really wanted to be a writer. I've had other kinds of jobs, but I've never stopped writing." Gay, who is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Purdue University, made a breakthrough in that long-held dream in 2014 with the publication of both her critically acclaimed debut novel, An Untamed State, and her first collection of essays, Bad Feminist: Essays.
Speaking with Joe Fassler in the Atlantic Online, Gay noted how her own quest for identity has infused her writing. The child of Haitian immigrants, she grew up in various suburbs of the Midwest, feeling out of place in a number of communities: "I grappled with being black in America and being Haitian in black America and being black American in Haiti and being middle class when that was rarely considered a possibility for someone who looked like me. I was also trying to make sense of desire and sexuality and wanting so much for myself that felt forbidden. I was trying to figure out who I was and what might be possible for me. I was trying to write toward a space where I could reveal my most authentic self to the people who knew me but did not." Gay is a product of the Midwest as much as she is of this gulf between cultures. Speaking with Paper Darts Web site writer Letitia L. Moffitt, Gay noted the importance of this influence in her writing life: "I'm more intrigued by the small town and all the complexity that can be found therein, about the lives people manage to create for themselves when they are so far removed from urban experiences, about how they survive, about how they thrive, or don't. Can you imagine what's going on with a man who has never left the county where he was born? My goodness. I have grown weary of this idea of the flyover state. People actually live in those states and when I can, I try to write there so that those places can become more than this vast monolith too narrowly encapsulated by a pithy phrase."
These thoughts and feelings are all reflected in Gay's work, from her online essays to her first book, Ayiti, a blend of poetry, essay, and fiction that looks at the Haitian diaspora, to An Untamed State, and Bad Feminist. Gay is also a well-known writer in the world of blogs and Twitter, known for her "sharp wit and affecting honesty, and for consistently publishing amazing work," according to Joshunda Sanders on the Buzzfeed Web site. Speaking with Sanders, Gay offered the following advice to prospective writers and bloggers: "You have to be consistent. You have to be yourself. You have to be committed to what you're doing. You have to not be afraid to be ambitious. You don't want to be so focused on yourself and what you're doing that you forget to read other writers." In a London Guardian Online interview with Kira Cochrane, Gay commented that writing is for her a way "to think through what it means to be in this world." Gay added: "I definitely write to reach other people, but I write for myself first. I don't mean that in an arrogant way. It's just that this is me trying to make sense of my place, and how did I get here, and why am I so lucky in some ways, and so unlucky in others? So it starts with me, and then I move beyond the self, as much as I can.
Gay's first novel, An Untamed State, tells of a young newlywed, Mireille, Haitian-born and living in Miami, who goes on vacation in Haiti with her husband and infant son. She is visiting her wealthy parents in Port-au-Prince when she is abducted by a gang that makes a living of such kidnappings. However, in this case, Mireille's parents refuse to pay the ransom, and she is thus subjected to thirteen days of brutal sexual abuse and torture before finally being released. Shattered, she must now find a way to regain her life.
Writing in the Chicago Magazine Online, Tomi Obaro noted of this first novel: "Written in detached, almost clinical prose, ... it's a compelling and at times painful read that addresses the issues of economic privilege, immigration, and sexual assault." It is all the more immediate, as Gay herself was the victim of a gang rape as a twelve-year-old. A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that Mireille's "shattered physical and psychological state ... is at once disturbing and frighteningly resonant." Booklist critic Donna Seaman also had high praise for this first novel, calling it "ferocious, gripping, and unforgettable." Likewise, a Kirkus Reviews contributor noted: "Among the strongest achievements of this novel is that Mireille's story feels complete and whole while emphasizing its essential brokenness. A cutting and resonant debut."
Library Journal writer Ashanti White also had a positive assessment of An Untamed State, commenting: "Gay brilliantly writes of the story's external events while skillfully capturing Mireille's internal anguish." And for Washington Post Online reviewer Ron Charles, An Untamed State was a "smart, searing novel."
In her book of essays, Bad Feminist, many of which are culled from her online writings, Gay takes on the traditional notion of feminism in which everyone must follow a consistent mode of behavior and beliefs. She admits to inconsistencies: listening to loud rap music when driving, even though the lyrics are often misogynistic, or to loving romantic comedies, despite the fact that they portray an unrealistic dynamic. Writing in Mother Jones Online, Levintova noted: "Bad Feminist reads like an autobiography, segueing from elements of Gay's life--her Nebraska upbringing, her Haitian-American family, her cooking--into smart critiques of everything from reproductive rights to the Sweet Valley High and Twilight books. It's a mix of the somber and the hilarious." Gay remarked to Elle Online contributor Alicia Bunker on her goals for writing Bad Feminist: "I want readers to see feminism as a more inclusive space and recognize the importance of claiming feminism. I want them to recognize the ways in which popular culture are damaging for women and people of color, while also acknowledging that it's okay to consume this popular culture. We are, after all, only human. I am offering ideas about how we can be better about the business of being human."
A Publishers Weekly reviewer had high praise for Bad Feminist, noting: "Whatever her topic, Gay's provocative essays stand out for their bravery, wit, and emotional honesty." More mixed was the assessment of a Kirkus Reviews critic who dubbed it an "occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism."
FURTHER READINGS:
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2014, Donna Seaman, review of An Untamed State, p. 46.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2014, review of An Untamed State; July 1, 2014, review of Bad Feminist: Essays.
Library Journal, February 1, 2014, Ashanti White, review of An Untamed State, p. 62.
Publishers Weekly, February 17, 2014, review of An Untamed State, p. 76; June 30, 2014, review of Bad Feminist, p. 51.
ONLINE
Atlantic Online, http://www.theatlantic.com/ (May 13, 2014), Joe Fassler, "What Zadie Smith Taught Roxane Gay: Identity Is Drag."
AV Club, http://www.avclub.com/ (May 5, 2014), Ellen Wernecke, review of An Untamed State.
Blue Mesa Review, http://bluemesareview.org/ (May 8, 2014), Brenna Gomez, "An Interview with Roxane Gay."
Boston Globe Online, http://www.bostonglobe.com/ (June 14, 2014), Laura Collins-Hughes, review of An Untamed State.
Buzzfeed, http://www.buzzfeed.com/ (May 18, 2014), Joshunda Sanders, "The Untamed State of Roxane Gay."
CBS News, http://www.cbsnews.com/ (July 16, 2014), "Roxane Gay on Inequality and Those Left Behind."
Chicago Magazine Online, http://www.chicagomag.com/ (April 23, 2014), Tomi Obaro, "How Roxane Gay Wrote an Untamed State."
Chicago Reader, http:/ /www.chicagoreader.com/ (July 18, 2013), Austin Gilkeson, review of Ayiti.
Chicago Tribune Online, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/ (May 2, 2014), Amy Gentry, review of An Untamed State.
Elevated Difference, http://elevatedifference.com/ (December 28, 2010), Melissa Ruiz, review of Girl Crush: Women's Erotic Fantasies.
Elle Online, http://www.elle.com/ (June 24, 2014), Alicia Brunker, "Roxane Gay on Why It's Okay to Be a Bad Feminist."
Examiner, http://www.examiner.com/ (July 19, 2010), Sarah Estrella, review of Girl Crush.
Fictionaut, http://fictionaut.com/ (July 25, 2014), "Roxane Gay."
Great Discontent, https://thegreatdiscontent.com/ (May 9, 2014), Tina Essmaker, author interview.
Guardian Online, http://www.theguardian.com/ (May 9, 2014), Jessica Valenti, "Why It's OK to be a Bad Feminist"; (August 1, 2014), Kira Cochrane, "Roxane Gay: Meet the Bad Feminist."
Journal Sentinel, http://www.jsonline.com/ (May 23, 2014), Jay Grabiec, "Talking with An Untamed State Author Roxane Gay."
Kenyon Review, http://www.kenyonreview.org/ (December 14, 2011), Weston Cutter, "A Brief Interview with Roxane Gay."
Lippincott Massie McQuilkin, http://www.lmqlit.com/ (August, 2014), "Roxane Gay."
Lit Pub, http://thelitpub.com/ (June 25, 2012), Nathan Goldman, "Glimpses of Personal Secrets, Situations of Real Human Beings," review of Ayiti.
Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/ (May 25, 2014), Chris Daley, review of An Untamed State.
Mental Floss, http://mentalfloss.com/ (July 25, 2014), Jen Doll, "How to Procrastinate Wisely, according to Writer Roxane Gay."
Miami Herald, http://www.miamiherald.com/ (May 9, 2014), Ariel Gonzalez, review of An Untamed State.
Monkey Bicycle, http:/ /monkeybicycle.net/ (October 1, 2011), review of Ayiti.
Mother Jones, http://www.motherjones.com/ (July 14, 2014), Hannah Levintova, "Roxane Gay Will Make You Proud to Be a Bad Feminist."
National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/ (July 5, 2014), Annalisa Quinn, "Roxane Gay: 'Bad Feminist,' Real Person."
Necessary Fiction, http://necessaryfiction.com/ (December 12, 2011), Thomas Michael Duncan, review of Ayiti.
New York Times Online, http://www.nytimes.com/ (May 9, 2014), Holly Bass, review of An Untamed State; (July 25, 2014), Jessica Gross, "Roxane Gay's 'Bad' Feminism."
Paper Darts, http://paperdarts.org/ (April 26, 2012), Letitia L. Moffitt, "Interview: Roxane Gay."
Roxane Gay Home Page, http://www.roxanegay.com (July 25, 2014).
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (June 4, 2014), "The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Roxane Gay."
Time Online, http://time.com/ (May 7, 2014), Nolan Feeney, review of An Untamed State.
Volume 1 Brooklyn, http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/ (November 2, 2011), Jason Diamond, "Conversation: Roxane Gay."
Washington Post Online, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ (March 27, 2014), Ron Charles, review of An Untamed State. *
Gay, Roxane. Difficult Women
Ashanti White
Library Journal. 141.20 (Dec. 1, 2016): p92.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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* Gay, Roxane. Difficult Women. Grove. Jan. 2017.272p. ISBN 9780802125392. $25; ebk. ISBN 9780802189646. F
Following her acclaimed novel, An Untamed State, Gay expands her writing prowess with this collection featuring colorful women protagonists. One woman relishes her relationship with her husband and his twin; another forges a friendship with her deceased father's mistress; a group of professional women participate in fight clubs. The stories also include complicated men, including the priest who engages in a torrid affair with a "wild woman" but does not feel bad about it. Gay is at her best when merging vivid yet straightforward language with stories that contain an element of folklore. "Water, All Its Weight," for example, uses the imagery of water to discuss the experiences of a young woman. Another highlight is the title story, which dissects the different thoughts and responses of some women; the subheads include "How a Mother Loves," "What Happens When a Crazy Woman Snaps," and "What a Loose Woman Sees in the Mirror." VERDICT Refreshing yet intricate, in the vein of Clarence Major's Chicago Heat and Other Stories, this work will appeal to lovers of literary and feminist fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 6/25/16.]--Ashanti White, Fayetteville, NC
White, Ashanti
Difficult Women
Annie Bostrom
Booklist. 113.5 (Nov. 1, 2016): p25.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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Difficult Women. By Roxane Gay. Jan. 2017. 272p. Grove, $25 (9780802125392).
As the title of her new collection suggests, essayist (Bad Feminist, 2014) and novelist (An Untamed State, 2014) Gay tells intimate, deep, wry tales of jaggedly dimensional women. Gay sets her stories, which have all appeared previously in a variety of publications, in many corners of the U.S., with Upper Michigan the most frequent locale. In the brilliant "North Country," a woman wonders if she can survive the frigid bleakness for the two years her postdoctoral fellowship requires, and in "Bone Density," a writer turns a blind eye to her respected husband's many affairs while meeting her own lover in a cabin in the woods. Some stories approach fantasy, as in "Requiem for a Glass Heart," when a man called only "the stone thrower" loves a woman made entirely of glass, and in "Noble Things," in which a couple must choose sides for the sake of their son after the second Civil War and the secession of the American South. Be they writer, scientist, or stripper, Gay's women suffer grave abuses, mourn unfathomable losses, love hard, and work harder.--Annie Bostrom
Gay, Roxane: DIFFICULT WOMEN
Kirkus Reviews. (Nov. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Gay, Roxane DIFFICULT WOMEN Grove (Adult Fiction) $25.00 1, 3 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2539-2
A collection of stories unified in theme--the struggles of women claiming independence for themselves--but wide-ranging in conception and form.The women who populate this collection from the novelist and essayist Gay (Bad Feminist, 2014, etc.) are targets for aggressions both micro and macro, from the black scholar in "North Country" who receives constant unwelcome advances and questions of "Are you from Detroit?" to the sisters brutally held in captivity while teenagers in the bracing and subtle "I Will Follow You." Gay savvily navigates the ways circumstances of gender and class alter the abuses: "Florida" is a cross-section of the women in a wealthy development, from the aimless, neglected white housewives to the Latina fitness trainer who's misunderstood by them. The men in these stories sometimes come across as caricatures, archetypal violent misogynist-bigots like the wealthy white man playing dress-up with hip-hop culture and stalking the student/stripper in "La Negra Blanca." But again, Gay isn't given to uniform indictments: "Bad Priest" is a surprisingly tender story about a priest and the woman he has an affair with, and "Break All the Way Down" is a nuanced study of a woman's urge for pain in a relationship after the loss of her son. Gay writes in a consistently simple style, but like a longtime bar-band leader, she can do a lot with it: repeating the title phrase in "I Am a Knife" evokes the narrator's sustained experience with violence, and the title story satirizes snap judgments of women as "loose," "frigid," and "crazy" with plainspoken detail. When she applies that style to more allegorical or speculative tales, though, the stories stumble: "Requiem for a Glass Heart" is an overworked metaphorical study of fragility in relationships; "The Sacrifice of Darkness" is ersatz science fiction about the sun's disappearance; "Noble Things" provocatively imagines a second Civil War but without enough space to effectively explore it. 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.
Difficult Women
Publishers Weekly. 263.43 (Oct. 24, 2016): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Difficult Women
Roxane Gay. Grove, $25 (272p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2539-2
Gay (Bad Feminist) pens a powerful collection of short stories about difficult, troubled, headstrong, and unconventional women. "I Will Follow You" tracks the bond of two adult sisters who refuse to live in fear after being kidnapped and assaulted as young girls. In "The Mark of Cain," a wife pretends not to know that her abusive husband has swapped places with his kinder identical twin, who doesn't beat her. The darkly humorous title story outlines the traits of different types of "difficult women" in flash-style vignettes. A jilted woman recovering from delivering a stillborn child finds love far from her home and past in "North Country." And in "Break All the Way Down," a couple learns to overcome their guilt and grief over the death of their son when they are handed a new child by a mother who can't care for her. 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. Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincott Massie McQui/kin. (Jan.)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Gay's 'Difficult Women' not so easily pegged
Jaleesa M. Jones
USA Today. (Jan. 25, 2017): Lifestyle: p06D.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
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Byline: Jaleesa M. Jones
This is not a book you read for escapism.
The characters who inhabit Difficult Women (Grove Press, 256 pp., **** out of four), Roxane Gay's gut-wrenching collection of short stories, are too close for that kind of comfort. They aren't just characters. They are our mothers, sisters and partners. They are human. They are us.
In narratives that brush past as quickly as childhood, Gay (Bad Feminist) captures entire lifetimes, painstakingly sketching women, the underlying drives that shape them and the indignities that color the lenses through which they see the world.
Gay's style isn't paint-by-numbers, either. It's pointillism -- and details such as race, class and sexuality are not missed. Gay has a deft touch with how those intersecting identities mold and shape women's experiences.
In "FLORIDA," we see a sprawling gated community: privileged white housewives trying to whittle themselves into something their husbands will keep, immigrant families looking to close the distance between themselves and the American dream, a Latina fitness instructor trying to work with -- and, at times, around -- the presumptuous residents.
In "La Negra Blanca," a mixed-race student, who moonlights as a stripper, is confronted by a white, affluent bigot, an "occupational hazard," as she tiredly calls him.
In "North Country," a black structural engineer tries to make sense of life outside the lab while students and co-workers try to make sense of her, testing and violating her boundaries.
These stories are grounded in reality, but even in the metaphorical "Water, All Its Weight," "Requiem for a Glass Heart" and "The Sacrifice of Darkness," experiences and emotions don't feel any further removed.
Difficult Women is not a collection of happy stories, but 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.
CAPTION(S):
photo Jay Grabiec
Roxane Gay’s powerful new story collection, ‘Difficult Women’
By Megan Mayhew Bergman January 3
Anyone familiar with Roxane Gay’s work — particularly her best-selling essay collection, “Bad Feminist,” or her scalding debut novel, “An Untamed State” — will not be surprised by the territory she travels in her new story collection, “Difficult Women.” Racial tension, gender conflict and class disparity push and pull at her stories. But Gay takes rewarding risks in form, placing traditional narratives about failed relationships alongside inventive stories that dive into surrealism. One, for instance, involves a glass wife. “He is a flesh-and-blood man,” she writes, “going about the business of living with his glass wife and glass child, their glass furniture and glass lives.” At times, her controlled prose breaks into hypnotic lyricism, such as the haunting repetition of a hard-working line: “I am a knife.”
(Grove)
Gay is a renowned cultural critic and woman of ideas — and the real gift to readers in “Difficult Women” is her ability to marry her well-known intellectual concerns with good storytelling. The book explores the lives of women who, because of sex, race, class or demeanor have been silenced or deemed “difficult”: weary maids fending off advances, Latina aerobics instructors in gated communities, victims of assault, sex workers, a black engineer tired of patronizing co-workers. We glimpse the slights and economic hardships these women endure and see how emotional damage manifests itself into hardened personalities and complicated relationships. We come to understand why a woman might choose being “difficult” over a life spent being appealing.
Sex and sexual trauma run like a current through the collection. Women are driven to infidelity by unmet needs, forged and damaged by past encounters. In the opening story, “I Will Follow You,” two sisters become forever bound to one another after falling into the hands of a predator and are unable to find safe and meaningful relationships in adulthood. In “La Negra Blanca” a Sartre-reading woman of mixed race pays for college by stripping and endures a violent rape, chalking it up to an “occupational hazard.” When pressed to go to the police, she demurs, pleading fatigue one imagines is not just of the moment, but lifelong. “She is beyond tired,” Gay writes. “She is empty and she wants quiet. She wants quiet.”
[Review: ‘An Untamed State,’ by Roxane Gay]
Gay allows her female characters to own their primal appetites, and she gives the sexual relationship between characters significant weight: What, after all, is more revealing than one’s preferences and perversions, the way one treats the body of another? Her restrained and forthright style allows her to write sensual scenes with efficacy, grit and authority, such as one that takes place in a dim trailer, with a beautiful older woman who greets the protagonist “wearing a silky robe that she let fall open.”
Gay excels in her allowance for human complexity. Trauma gives way to unusual pleasure, and healing might be found through more pain or submission. “I marvel at her creativity and her cruelty,” one character says of another in the story “Baby Arm,” “and how much she loves me.” A daughter aware her father is cheating hopes her mother is having an affair as well “with the guy from the hardware store or one of the deacons from church.” A brothel thrives within a posh gated community in Florida, populated by defiant “therapists” who “sit on the large lanai behind the spa in negligees,” with voices “deep and velvety in the way of women who know things.”
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Author Roxane Gay at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Ill., in 2014. (Jay Grabiec)
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. One woman, accused of being loose, avoids real love because she has “already learned the dangers of sincerity.” Another, in “The Mark of Cain,” pretends not to know that her husband and his twin switch places in her bed. “I am the kind of woman who doesn’t mind indulging the deception,” she tells the reader. Later, they will drink wine and “practice being normal.” These knowing women realize that “normal” lives are performative.
Readers long used to male-dominated grit lit and sexual violence directed toward women in movies and books may find the inverse of these tropes surprising — like the all-out female slugfest in the basement of a shopping mall, or a daughter who sleeps with her dead father’s mistress. Men are portrayed as hapless virgins, and some leave women “intrigued but vaguely unsatisfied.” A priest, after an extramarital tryst, attempts to “clean himself with thin paper towels and foamy dollops of industrial soap.” There is an invitation, throughout this book, to interrogate our assumptions about the lives and motives of others.
The book itself is dedicated to “difficult women,” whom, Gay writes, “should be celebrated for their very nature.” It is possible that, as in reality, the difficulty these characters face allows them to become expansive, weary but wise. Damaged, difficult women can be strong and possess real agency over their so-called “bad” decisions. In a dark and modern way, this collection celebrates the post-traumatic enlightenment of women.
Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of the collections “Birds of a Lesser Paradise” and “Almost Famous Women” and a forthcoming novel, “The Exhibition.”
On Feb. 11 at 7:30 p.m., Roxane Gay and Viet Thanh Nguyen will discuss their work at St. Paul’s Church, 4900 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20008. For tickets and more information, call Politics & Prose Bookstore at 202-364-1919 or visit politics-prose.com.
DIFFICULT WOMEN
By Roxane Gay
Grove/Atlantic. 256 pp. $25
Roxane Gay's new book 'Difficult Women' proves
her power
By Anna James
JANUARY 12, 2017, 7:30 AM
n her new shortstory collection “Difficult Women,” Roxane Gay is razor sharp on the constant
contradictions of being a woman — the terrible mundanity and the terrible violence of it all, and the way
these two things rub up against each other so fondly.
In 2014, Gay seemed to be everywhere, with Time declaring it “the year of Roxane Gay” after the publication of
a book of essays, “Bad Feminist,” and her debut novel, “An Untamed State.” The essays were exciting because
she put a label on a debate that had been stewing for a long time. If the term “bad feminist” doesn’t sound that
revolutionary from a 2017 perspective, in the 2014 maelstrom of heated arguments about what feminism means
and who is doing it “right,” her collection of essays came just at the right moment. Suddenly the phrase bad
feminist was everywhere, and Gay managed to strike a chord on how complex intersectional feminism is. Not
that these debates have gone away, but they have evolved, thanks in part to Gay opening up the conversation.
Roxane Gay, author of "Difficult Women. Credit: Jay Grabiec (Jay Grabiec)
3/9/2017 Roxane Gay's new book 'Difficult Women' proves her power LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/lacajcroxanegay20170112story.html 2/3
“Bad Feminist” was published in Britain while I was working as the literary editor for Elle UK and although it
was enjoyed in the office, it was ultimately not mentioned in the magazine after being deemed “too American”
by my editor. But Gay’s reputation spread: Everyone was asking if you’d read “Bad Feminist,” and she was a
veritable phenomenon in the U.S. So when I received a proof copy of her new collection of short stories from
her U.K. publisher, I was interested in the way I am always curious about writers who elicit excitement when
they create something new.
“Difficult Women” is about many kinds of women; they vary in race, ethnicity, sexuality and age. It is about
sisters, friends, daughters and wives, although those simple labels belie complicated relationships. Many of the
relationships are with men, but the really interesting ones are about the bonds between women, and two of the
most affecting stories concern sisters (“I Will Follow You” and “How”).
These short stories have given Gay’s writing and ideas a way to transcend boundaries in a way “Bad Feminist”
couldn’t and reveal her to be a writer as interested in form and language as she is in social commentary.
The stories are explicitly or implicitly set in the U.S. but they feel universal in a way nonfiction never truly can,
because it does not need to be mired in the particular or the accurate. Gay then builds on this feeling by the
clever use of magical realism. There’s a distinct echo of Angela Carter or Helen Oyeyemi at play; dark fables and
twisted morality tales sit alongside the contemporary and the realistic, although the majority of them have some
element of magic or the surreal at play.
There are common themes throughout the collection, but you never know what you are going to get next. Dark
twists move to happy endings, brutality moves to romance from story to story. Although most are straight prose
there are moments of narrative playfulness. “Florida” features snapshots of different lives within a gated
community in Naples, and in the title story, a taxonomy of different types of women is used to great effect:
loose women, frigid women, crazy women. Each woman is divided into sections: “What a Loose Woman Sees in
the Mirror”; “What a Crazy Woman Thinks About While Walking Down the Street.” The respective answers are:
“Nothing. She doesn’t look. She doesn’t need to. She knows exactly who she is,” and “It’s the presumption in the
way he doesn’t hide his interest that makes her hold the sharp letter opener in the cool palm of her hand.” The
story ends with dead women: “Death makes them more interesting. Death makes them more beautiful.”
The stories are frequently about sex or rape but are not titillating or gratuitous; they are harrowing and
unflinching. The scenes of sexual violence feel relevant, raw and true to life, and they are effectively contrasted
against scenes of consensual, if rarely gentle, sex. Among them are a handful of unashamed, unusual, love
“
These short stories... reveal her to be a writer as
interested in form and language as she is in social
commentary.
3/9/2017 Roxane Gay's new book 'Difficult Women' proves her power LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/lacajcroxanegay20170112story.html 3/3
stories; “North Country” is about a tentative relationship in snowy Michigan and “The Sacrifice of Darkness” is
a fable about the legacy of a man who flies into the sun.
The longer stories are almost always the most successful; managing to balance clever concepts with a more
languid reveal. The very short, “flash” stories can collapse a little under the weight of the one idea or line that
birthed them. Having said that, of a collection of 21 stories, eight were truly exceptional pieces of storytelling
and I actively disliked only one (“A Pat,” the shortest story, which seemed a touch trite to me, standing out in a
collection that mostly fiercely resists cliches and convention).
That she slips seemingly effortlessly among the voices of these different, difficult women is perhaps the core of
why new writing from Gay is so exciting to so many readers. The stories feel like snapshots of real lives, even the
more fantastical stories.
It is a book about the violence done to women and the violence of being a woman. The book is dedicated: “For
difficult women, who should be celebrated for their nature” but it is not quite a celebration but more of a history
and a testament. It feels like the book we have been waiting for Gay to write.
Anna James, @acaseforbooks, is an author and journalist living in London.
::
“Difficult Women”
Roxane Gay
Grove Press: 272 pp., $25
No Shrinking Violets: A Short Story Collection From Roxane Gay
By GEMMA SIEFFJAN. 3, 2017
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DIFFICULT WOMEN
By Roxane Gay
260 pp. Grove Press. $25.
What constitutes a difficult woman? For Roxane Gay, she is easy — by the third date, one of her troubled, troublesome narrators tells us: “We have already slept together, twice. I’m not a hard sell.” She is also needy, moody and above all unpredictable, which makes her dangerous. She is the opposite of Estelle, a minor character in “Difficult Women,” Gay’s new collection of stories, “a pale blond sliver of Connecticut” who clutches her pearls and thinks Baltimore is a jungle. Gay’s difficult women are as wild as Tarzan’s Jane. Or rather, because many of these stories are set in cold Northern states, they’re wild enough to hunt deer with their husbands. They sully pure white snow with cigarette ash and keep boredom at bay with scarcely secret love affairs. “We play games because we can and we like it,” the narrator of “Bone Density” says. “Most days these games keep us together, somehow.”
Gay has fun with these ladies. Her narrative games aren’t rulesy. She plays with structure and pacing, breaking up some stories with internal chapterlets, writing long (upward of 20 pages) and very short (under two pages). 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 — there is a wife who is dogged by water, as if under a personal rain cloud, and a wife who is made of glass.
Within these free-form experiments one finds overlapping motifs. Terrible things keep happening to babies: They are stillborn, or abandoned, or turned into “a bloody stretch on the hot pavement of a parking lot” by an old lady driving a 1974 Grand Prix. A woman calling herself a knife performs a cesarean section with her fingernail. Pairs of women — sisters, twins, best friends — in possession of E.S.P. powers and able to reply to the other’s unspoken thoughts are inseparable through thick and thin. If one gets kidnapped, the other hurls herself into the back of the pedophile’s van. If one runs away to join her husband in another state, the other knows it is her lot to go too. If one runs away from a deadbeat dad and unsupportive brothers, the other follows, husband and baby in tow. If one develops real feelings for a new boyfriend, the other vets him by eavesdropping on their lovemaking: “I hand him the phone. I say, ‘She wants to talk to you.’ He smiles the sleaziest smile and says, ‘Two chicks. That’s hot,’ and I tell him not to talk too much so we can still fall in love. . . . Gus puts Tate on speakerphone and she tells him all the terrible things she wants him to do to me. I marvel at her creativity and her cruelty and how much she loves me.”
Sex and violence are just as tightly entwined. “I lay back on the ground, now soaked with the deer’s blood. My husband undressed me slowly then stood and stared at me naked, shivering next to the animal he killed. I wondered if he could tell us apart.” Nearly every story in the collection features one or more bouts of ferocious sex during which shoulders and earlobes are gnawed and tongues half-swallowed. “I love his body and enjoy marking him with my fingernails, leaving the skin of his back angry and broken,” the game-playing narrator of “Bone Density” says. Gay’s female masochists give as good as they get. In “Break All the Way Down,” a mother grieving the accidental death of her son begs her husband to hit her; when he won’t, she finds a man at a bar who will. “You’re stronger than I thought,” her husband says at one point. “You have no idea,” she replies.
The dialogue in “Difficult Women” occasionally falters, tending toward telegraphic language that broadcasts too tidily a character’s interiority. A rich WASPy father who shares his son’s lust for black women tells him: “You can look, boy, but you cannot touch. The family can’t afford the scandal.” Caridad, a fitness instructor and personal trainer, gets propositioned by an older male client and tells him: “I’m only here to help make bodies better. My body isn’t for sale.” Lines like these feel too obvious, especially compared with the cryptic, claustrophobic relationships described in these pages and the strange detours that riddle Gay’s imaginary landscapes. With “Difficult Women,” you really have no idea what’s going to happen next.
Gemma Sieff’s work has appeared in n+1, Vice and The Paris Review.
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay review – bold feminist stories
The premises are intriguing and the language powerful, but the bestial men and masochistic women weaken these tales
A writer of formidable charm and intellect … Roxane Gay.
A writer of charm and intellect … Roxane Gay. Photograph: Jennifer Silverberg for the Guardian
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Sandra Newman
Friday 10 February 2017 10.00 EST Last modified on Friday 10 February 2017 19.10 EST
Roxane Gay is one of those public intellectuals who has come to represent a school of thought: in her case, a 21st-century intersectional feminism that’s friendly to lipstick but against body shaming; fond of pop culture but strongly critical of its exclusionary tendencies. She is known for her fierce stance against violence towards women, and against the way fictional representations tend to normalise or even excuse it. But in her new short story collection, she is in danger of suggesting that women can find abuse both cathartic and sexually satisfying.
Gay is a writer of formidable charm and intellect, with a knack for intriguing premises. She is especially masterful at writing striking openings: “My husband is not a kind man and with him, I am not a good person”; “The stone-thrower lives in a glass house with his glass family”; “My husband is a hunter. I am a knife”. In many stories, this strength is sustained and magnified. “Requiem for a Glass Heart” develops into a beautiful allegory on human frailty. Another gem is “North Country”, about a young academic at an isolated college who starts a relationship with a working-class local; it’s meticulous in tone and detail, understated and exquisite.
Where there are flaws in individual stories, they are those one would expect from someone who is by temperament a popular writer. Gay’s language is powerful but sometimes careless, which can result in Fifty Shades prose, like this passage from “Noble Things”: “From the beginning, they had shared something strong, something beyond anything they had ever known … Parker loved her edge, how she could never be tamed.” The dialogue can also be mechanical. In “La Negra Blanca”, a woman being sexually harassed by her boss states baldly, “I need this job”, before submitting to his advances; he then says to her, “Do you need a Daddy?” by which point the reader is cringing for the wrong reasons. But we’re generally carried past these clumsy details by the force of Gay’s narrative voice.
The abuser is always a cartoonish, leering, violent pig who not only lacks good qualities; he lacks any other qualities
A peculiarity of short-story collections is that any preoccupation of the author stands out, as story after story returns to it. Here, violence against women appears in roughly half the stories. This is not unexpected; what is surprising is how it is portrayed. The abuser is always a cartoonish, leering, violent pig who not only lacks any good qualities; he lacks any other qualities. His only feelings are belligerent insecurity and bestial lust. His female partner feels nothing for him – not even fear or guilt. But all too often, she’s with him voluntarily because she wants to be beaten. Here is the culmination of a typical scene: “He clasped my throat and squeezed harder and harder, leaving his mark … I waited for him to punish me, and when he did, it was perfect relief.” To be clear, this is a sex scene. In Difficult Women, abuse only occurs in the context of sex.
Even in the stories that don’t deal with abuse, sex is most satisfying to women when it leaves bruises. Occasionally, the bruising is mutual: “They wanted to hurt each other as much as they loved each other.” More often, she alone is left with “fresh bruises spreading across my back, down my ass, between my thighs”. If a man is gentle, his partner chides him with, “You don’t have to be soft with me.” Long story cut short, she’s asking for it.
There are only two instances in which Gay’s protagonists don’t appreciate violent treatment in any way. First, thankfully, the stories involving abuse of children. And in the story “La Negra Blanca”, a woman who is raped is simply traumatised, as one would expect; but the story focuses so intently on the man’s vile, racist sexuality and lingers so much over physical details that it still leaves an ambiguous taste.
The one treatment of abuse that fully succeeds is in the final story, “Savage Gods”, where the protagonist’s masochism is deeply explored, and revealed to be a response to early sexual trauma. Here, the heroine’s psychology is utterly convincing, and the leering pig-like characters feel magnified by emotion rather than unrealistically caricatured. This demonstrates that Gay’s complex investment in this issue can produce fascinating results. But in most of the stories, the handling feels self-indulgent, even exploitative; it produces a torrid heat, but sheds no light.
• Sandra Newman’s The Country of Ice Cream Star is published by Vintage. Difficult Women is published by Corsair (£13.99). To order a copy for £9.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay review – stories of resilience
The author of Bad Feminist beautifully conjures tales of women who show strength under duress
Roxane Gay.
‘Beautifully written’: Roxane Gay. Photograph: Jennifer Silverberg for the Guardian
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Claire Kohda Hazelton
Sunday 1 January 2017 07.00 EST Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 09.01 EST
Roxane Gay describes the lives of more than 20 women in this collection of short stories. Despite the title, the factor that ties most of them together is the presence in their lives of “difficult” and/or abusive men: a man abducts and rapes two young sisters; a hydrologist harasses a female structural engineer; an aged, alcoholic father is taken in by the two daughters he abused, and so on. Gay’s women are perpetually under threat. However, Gay never portrays them as weak. Each possesses a strength that enables them to escape, move on or distance themselves from difficult situations. The title of the collection carries the same sarcasm as when Gay describes her female subjects with well-worn stereotypes: “crazy”, “loose”, “frigid”, etc. 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.
Review: 'Difficult Women,' by Roxane Gay
FICTION: Roxane Gay's stories reveal trauma and chauvinism.
By JOSH COOK Special to the Star Tribune DECEMBER 30, 2016 — 11:18AM
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Silence torments the women of “Difficult Women,” most of whom are victims of abuse, trauma, tragedy or some combination of the three.
In “I Will Follow You,” the opening story of Roxane Gay’s collection, the narrator explains how she and her sister are inseparable after surviving a childhood rape and kidnapping. Fear drives them to silence: “We were so little and so scared. That was enough to keep us quiet.” Later in life, their silence blooms to a reticent acceptance of subpar men.
The last story, “Strange Gods,” told in the second person, features a youngish narrator addressing her husband, explaining that she must come to terms with his goodness. She tries to push him away, admitting, “I am a vile thing next to you.” Her form of silence is a contemplative war with herself.
In “Florida,” a panoramic view of a gated community, a fitness instructor tolerates her sexually domineering lover. “She was smart enough to want more but tired enough to accept the way things were.” Her silence is the silence of exhaustion.
It wouldn’t take a cataloging; Gay’s women don’t have it easy. The “difficulty” in the title is their sarcastic comeback to doltish men who don’t understand complexity in general and the complexity of victimhood in particular.
The women here are complex, but not in the typical way of fiction. Much like Mireille, the protagonist of Gay’s profound and violent novel, “An Untamed State,” the women here reveal themselves in how their minds adjust to a world that seems bent on violating their bodies.
Difficult Women
By: Roxane Gay.
Publisher: Grove Press, 260 pages, $25.
Many of the protagonists explore sadomasochism as a balm. The narrator of “Baby Arm,” after attending a women-only fight club, implores her lover to hurt her. “Gus traces the bruises along my rib cage and on my face, even presses them until I wince. I say harder. He obeys.”
The most memorable example comes from the poignant “Break All the Way Down,” where the narrator says this of her husband: “If Ben would break the broken places in me a little more, if he would break whatever was left of me beneath my skin, I could finally break all the way down.”
At their worst, the men here are pedophiles, rapists and sexists. At their best, they’re armchair chauvinists with occasional flares of the fist. (Which may make men the best audience for this book.)
It’s no wonder that many of the women here find comfort in friendships — some sexual, some not — with other women.
This collection begs for a slow, serious reading. Sure, some themes and scenes and gestures repeat. Maybe a handful of the stories could have been left out, but there’s too much richness to let that nettle.
Josh Cook’s writing has been featured in Virginia Quarterly Review, the Iowa Review, the Millions and elsewhere. He lives in the Twin Cities.
In Roxane Gay’s Difficult Women, you’re either difficult or you’re dead
Updated by Constance Grady@constancegrady Jan 3, 2017, 9:30am EST
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Grove Press
When Roxane Gay picks up a label, she’ll play with it, rip it apart a little, break it down, and finally embrace it. She did it in 2014 with her essay collection, Bad Feminist, which explored what it means to be a committed feminist who also likes to dance to “Blurred Lines,” who is not beholden to an ideological purity. And now she’s doing it again in her new short story collection, Difficult Women.
A difficult woman, in these stories, is usually a woman who has been hurt, typically by living under the patriarchy and under white supremacy. The injuries vary, ranging in scope from the blunt force of unimaginable trauma to the death-by-a-thousand-papercuts of daily microaggressions.
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In “I Will Follow You,” the difficult woman was kidnapped by a child molester when she was 10 years old. 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 “Best Features,” she’s a fat woman who is quietly furious at how worthless the world considers her to be.
In the title story, Gay devotes herself to finding specificity in the abstraction of difficult woman archetypes. The loose woman likes men whose job titles end in the letters er. The frigid woman runs long distance so that she can feel the power of her body. 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 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.
Not all of Gay’s difficult women are as compelling at the rest. “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. 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.
But every short story collection has highs and lows. And the highs in Difficult Women are pretty damn high. Taken together, the stories celebrate the condition of being difficult in the face of a world that is determined to hurt you. Because it is only the dead girls, Gay concludes in the title story, who are never called difficult.
'Difficult Women': Bleak, but nimble short stories by Roxane Gay
February 5, 2017 12:00 AM
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difficult women roxane gay
roxane gay author-1 Roxane Gay.
Jay Grabie
Roxane Gay.
By Wendeline O. Wright
In author/activist Roxane Gay’s new short story collection “Difficult Women,” she writes that “silence is the cruelest of cruelties.” With that in mind, Ms. Gay’s work in these stories aims to end that silence by giving voices to women who are experiencing various struggles of their own. “Difficult Women” explores not only why some women may be considered difficult, but also what makes simply being a woman difficult. Full of despair and deception, yet sprinkled with hope and strength, the author has created stories that, while not light-hearted, ultimately affirm to readers that whatever their personal experiences, they are not alone.
"DIFFICULT WOMEN"
By Roxane Gay
Grove Press ($25).
One of the major themes of this collection is how women manage to survive various forms of trauma; the specter of sexual assault, and the effects that its victims experience for the rest of their lives looms large over “Difficult Women.” The opening story, “I Will Follow You,” traces two adult sisters navigating their lives together after being abducted and repeatedly raped as children. In particular, this story vividly illustrates how the criminal justice system fails to erase the emotional impact of such traumatic events, even after so-called justice is served: When their captor writes to the sisters to plead for forgiveness so he can be granted parole, the sisters remember “[w]e had learned to stop begging. He would, too, or he wouldn’t. It did not matter.”
With their focus on the issues women face, it is no surprise that Ms. Gay’s stories also take unflinching looks at pregnancy, motherhood and the loss of children. In “Break All the Way Down,” the protagonist is paralyzed with grief after the sudden loss of her toddler. Her attempts to overcome that grief lead her into an abusive affair as her estranged husband struggles to connect with her; the guilt she carries over “allowing” the accident to happen leaves her looking for ways to punish herself, highlighting the increased expectation of responsibility for the safety of children that mothers may shoulder over fathers.
Similarly, “North Country” follows a woman who has recently left a relationship that fell apart after she gave birth to a stillborn baby and her partner failed to understand her grief: “He told me I had no reason to mourn a child that never lived.” His ignorance of her experience of pregnancy, as well as his subsequent infidelity undermines her value, which means that she finds herself wary and willing to destroy a new relationship in order to avoid trusting someone again.
Although many of the 21 stories in “Difficult Women” are downbeat, there are still notes of optimism that imbue the collection with a sense of hope and recovery. “The Sacrifice of Darkness” is the story of a couple living in a world where the sun has literally been blocked out of the sky. While the world despairs, the couple manages to find happiness after having a child, the narrator explaining that “… the sky lightened the day my perfect child was born and that with time, the world would be bright again.” Another story, “How,” illustrates the redemptive and life-changing possibility of love, as the unhappily married narrator finds the strength to leave abusive family members behind in her love for her best friend and her sister.
Ms. Gay’s prose is undeniably sharp and to the point. No words are wasted, and every story is nimbly brought to life with deft observations and a willingness to speak the truth about the pain and happiness that women experience. The bleak nature of many of the stories can become overwhelming; it is emotionally exhausting to be subjected to the various types of trauma that the heroines of “Difficult Women” face, so it may behoove the reader to take the stories a few at a time. Yet, even with the melancholy bent of this collection, Ms. Gay has crafted unforgettable characters and stories that make the journey worthwhile.
Roxane Gay will read selections from “Difficult Women” at 7:30 p.m. March 6 as part of the Arts & Lecture series at Carnegie Music Hall, 4400 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213. Tickets are sold out, but partial view seats are available by phone at 412-622-8866.
Wendy Wright is a writer and editor living in Pittsburgh.
‘Difficult Women’ by Roxane Gay
Review by Theodosia Henney
January 8, 2017
Difficult Women is comprised of wildly different stories, ranging from realistic to magical, hopeful to dystopian. Only one constant remains throughout; women, who–in order to survive–must become more difficult than their situations. Each character–be she a grieving suburbanite mother, an international studies major who strips for tuition money, or a fantastical being made of glass–makes her own path towards sovereignty in the face of innumerable obstacles and violations. Many of the characters demonstrate an acute awareness of their own flaws and the ways in which they are accountable to the violence in their lives, be it emotional or physical.
One of the most luscious aspects of Gay’s characters is the way in which they refuse easy categorization, and often the most archetypal exterior disguises a complex and unexpected interior. That women possess unseen depths is, of course, no surprise at all to anyone who has ever identified as one (though it still manages to catch an absurd number of people off guard) and Gay makes it clear her characters are not here to fulfill fantasies or act as empty cyphers. Rather, they are here to demonstrate their difficulties, unquietly.
While most of the scenarios in Difficult Women are emotionally and physically brutal—twins abducted and tortured, a toddler killed by an unwary driver, a future in which the U.S. suffers a bloody cessation—there are moments of levity to be found. Gay excels at well-placed wry observation and occasional understated absurdity, such as when, in “Baby Arm,” the feral ecstasy of an all-girl fight club is interrupted only by a jab about one participant’s weight—“We all gasp because the tomboy is big-boned but she’s not fat.”
Stylistically, Gay doesn’t pull any punches; the prose is typically lean and crisp, embedded with only necessary details. The generosity with which each character is allowed to embody their ‘undesirable’ qualities renders their decisions and acts as morally neutral. In other words, while the reader witnesses these characters navigate worlds fraught with danger and moral devices, we are not invited to judge them, but rather to understand the ways in which their difficultness is their best chance at existence.
Difficult Women will leave you feeling cracked open and rummaged through, though it may also leave you with a sense of hope; just as there are endless ways for the world to devour you, so too are there endless ways of becoming difficult to swallow.
- See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/01/08/difficult-women-by-roxane-gay/#sthash.KYGLEFaB.dpuf
Review: Roxane Gay's 'Difficult Women' offers stories with range and insight
Colette BancroftColette Bancroft, Times Book Editor
Thursday, December 29, 2016 8:00am
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The stories in Difficult Women range in length from a couple of pages to 20 or more. Some of the longer stories layer multiple characters and plots, like the title story, a catalog of “difficult” women and how they got that way.
iStockphotoThe stories in Difficult Women range in length from a couple of pages to 20 or more. Some of the longer stories layer multiple characters and plots, like the title story, a catalog of “difficult” women and how they got that way.
Fans of writer Roxane Gay won't be surprised to hear that her new short story collection, Difficult Women, deals with such subjects as sexual relationships, motherhood and body image, or that the stories' tones range from comic to harrowing, sometimes in a paragraph or two.
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But they might be surprised that, though many of the stories are realistic, quite a few venture into the territory of magical realism. In one, a small town copes with life after the sun vanishes; in another, a man marries a woman made of glass, her pulsing heart always visible.
The collection is titled Difficult Women, although in most of the stories there are just as many difficult men. Women's lives have been Gay's most consistent subject, in her bracing nonfiction collection Bad Feminist, her gripping debut novel Untamed State, her multigenre collection Ayiti and her many essays for online and print publications.
In those works and in these stories, she writes fearlessly and with insight about love and power between men and women, about the horror of sexual violence and its inescapable aftershocks, about the fierce and flawed tenderness of mothers for their children.
The stories in Difficult Women range in length from a couple of pages to 20 or more. Some of the longer stories layer multiple characters and plots, like the title story, a catalog of "difficult" women and how they got that way. There is, for example, a section titled "What a Crazy Woman Thinks About While Walking Down the Street": how she's dressed, how to ignore catcalls, when to make or not make eye contact, whether she has her keys ready to use as a weapon. Gay writes, "She once told a boyfriend about these considerations and he said, 'You are completely out of your mind.' She told a new friend at work and she said, 'Honey, you're not crazy. You're a woman.' "
One of the longest and strongest stories is FLORIDA, which builds the story of life in a gated subdivision by visiting various addresses. At 3333 Palmetto Crest Circle, a new resident assesses her female neighbors: "The women in Naples all looked the same — lean and darkly tan, their faces narrow with hungered discipline, whittled by the same surgeon." At 1217 Ridgewood Rd Unit 11, a couple's foreplay consists of watching reality TV shows about "extraordinarily fat people" who can't even get out of their chairs unaided. The husband tells us, "Mornings after Thank God We're Not Fat Sex, the wife and I tend to hate each other a little so we don't speak." And upstairs at 1217 Ridgewood Rd Unit 23, we meet Tricia, a house cleaner. She's good at what she does, and because of her hard work she's in great shape. The women who employ her resent her bitterly for looking better than they do: "It wasn't fair. Money was supposed to make things fair."
In some stories, race complicates relationships. La Negra Blanca is about Sarah, who is working her way through Johns Hopkins University as a stripper. "She plans on working for the CIA because she has become quite efficient at passing," despite her mixed-race background. When a wealthy racist from an old Southern family becomes obsessed with her, he seems foolish — at first.
Power balance in sexual relationships runs through many of these stories, and often plays out in surprising ways. In Break All the Way Down, the narrator tells us, "My husband hates my new boyfriend. I do, too. He is the kind of person everyone hates. My husband is the man I love." What all that means, and what kind of person the narrator is, will not be what you expect. In The Mark of Cain and How, twins complicate each other's romantic relationships. In Bone Density, a couple's marriage revolves around taunting each other with their infidelities.
Sexual power plays are one thing; sexual violence is quite another. Strange Gods is a heartbreaking, powerful tale of betrayal and assault and the long-lasting effects — and the courage it takes to live with them.
The stories that have fantastic elements still ring true emotionally. Requiem for a Glass Heart is a strange little fable about a stone thrower (that's his actual occupation) who finds a woman made of glass on a beach. He marries her, and they have a little glass son, a fancy that Gay makes believable by showing us how the woman's transparency gives her freedom, but fills her husband with fear for her vulnerability — fear anyone can understand. It's a dangerous world for a woman, even if you're not made of glass.
Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com. Follow @colettemb.
Difficult Women
By Roxane Gay
Grove Press, 256 pages, $25