Difficult Women is engrossing, jarring and inspiring
Difficult Women Roxane Gay Grove Press
There are two immediate results you get when you type “difficult women” into Google.
Glowing reviews for Roxane Gay’s sweeping short story collection, and misogynistic how-to guides for how to handle those wilful little ladies who just don’t know their place.
It’s a fitting dichotomy for a woman whose writing — which now stretches across genres and even mediums to include everything from essays to fiction to comic books — has become for many the benchmark of contemporary feminism.
Gay burst into mainstream success with her 2014 essay collection Bad Feminist. Her pithy attempts to rectify her love for bad music and reality television with her feminism struck a chord that rang true for women who want equal pay as much as they may indulge in hot pink frills.
But Difficult Women shows that Gay has been toiling, quietly building a reputation in literary communities for years before landing in the middle of our current culture war.
While Gay’s second novel, Untamed State, was published last year amid much chatter thanks to her growing notoriety as the bad feminist of our age, her first book Ayiti was a quieter success.
But the blend of genres it includes perhaps foretold that Gay would become one of those writers whose prose, whether it’s a short story, a novel or an essay, entangles one’s thoughts. Her new collection pulls together vastly different stories knitted together since the end of the last decade, and throughout she spurts out the kind of relatable truisms that make good fiction great:
“I wasn’t much popular, either. I was too smart, and that made people uncomfortable,” she writes in The Sacrifice of Darkness.
In Requiem for a Glass Heart, Gay writes of a man who throws stones for a living but has a glass wife and child, whom he loves deeply despite the difficulties and understandable fear — and yet he’s weak and needs a mistress for “those moments when he does not have to see too much or love too carefully.”
Short story collections are rarely the stuff of commercial success, though Difficult Women is set to be just that, already heading for a second printing. But more often these books are cobbled together from years of a writer’s struggle to pump out content for the dwindling number of outlets that publish such bursts of brilliance. Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize and Lynn Coady’s Giller Prize each spawned many think-pieces about a pending resurgence of the form that hasn’t quite materialized. And yet there’s something so writerly about a collection such as Gay’s that doesn’t feel like the same characters and the same grievances are simply on repeat.
The men who usually define the genre, early Hemingway or the Raymond Carvers of the world, have a certain understated prose style, but Gay’s work is as varied as women’s experiences. Each story feels fresh and new, a blanket of snow you both want and don’t want to muddy with a footprint.
Difficult Women is a book that’s simultaneously engrossing, jarring and creatively inspiring. It solidifies Gay’s place as one of the voices of our age.