Gay’s ‘Difficult Women’ not so easily pegged
Tapestry of tales gets to the heart of universal struggles
This is not a book you read for escapism. The characters who inhabit
Difficult Women (Grove Press, 256 pp., eeee 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 them- selves 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.