Difficult Women
Ratings16
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings16
Average rating3.8
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 Difficult Women, a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection. The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. A pair of sisters, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and must negotiate the elder sister's marriage. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind. From a girls’ fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July.
Reviews with the most likes.
A collection of marriage-, baby-normative stories with nearly identical protagonists. All formidably written of course.
Difficult to read, because of some of the trauma that these characters have experienced, but well worth it, in my opinion. Roxanne Gay's writing style is excellent and I'm excited to read more from her.
The book is well written, which annoys me, because the stories it contains are a strange mix of magical realism and wattpad porn.
I love magical realism and I can't bear to watch it be scathed with vulgar, repetitious accounts of sexual intercourse that always sounds the same, even if the people having it are always different.
What annoyed me the most, though, wasn't the unnecessary, boring sex.
It was the fact that the women protagonists are not difficult, they are just women.
Sad, broken women. But just women.
Here's a more accurate title for the book: Hurt Women.
Unless the clever idea is, there are difficult women and easy women, the latter being those who acquiesce silently to a society that wants us docile, defenseless and happy to be so.
I haven't met many such women, but I have met a lot of sad women and they aren't always the same.
Too many fucks given to lay claims to a universal.
No rating DNF'ed. I have to accept that short story collections just aren't my thing.
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