Roxane Gay

Difficult Women

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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.
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262 printed pages
Original publication
2017
Publication year
2017
Have you already read it? How did you like it?
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Impressions

  • Isabel Jazmín Angelesshared an impression4 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    🔮Hidden Depths

    Ninguna de las narraciones nos deja indiferentes, en todas hay algún tipo de violencia la cual tiene repercusiones inmediatas y a largo plazo.

    Un libro difícil de leer pero muy bien escrito, que deja pensando y perturba a quien lo lee.

  • Rebe Mirandashared an impression5 years ago
    👍Worth reading

    All of the stories were Earth shattering. So good.

  • magnetgrrlshared an impression8 years ago

    Eh. The second half got really boring/repetitive for me. Story after story of woman in slightly dysfunctional relationship with man but owning it, with TMI details of their sex lives that somehow remain pretty tame (or else, I suppose, these literate short stories would dip into erotica). There were one or two stories in the first half or first third I liked but I can't remember titles now; they sort of run together. Although I'm usually excited to see MI as a story setting, even though MI and the UP are used as settings a few times, as someone who grew up there and visits family there regularly, it doesn't feel very authentic or real, which was disappointing.

Quotes

  • Liz Stolpovskayahas quoted6 years ago
    Peter would prefer to have sex every day. Hanna would prefer to never have sex with Peter again, not because she’s frigid but because she finds it difficult to become aroused by a perpetually unemployed man.
  • Seth Bingohas quoted6 years ago
    I also learned the word dendrochronology—analyzing the patterns of tree rings to know everything that has ever happened to a tree. This is how I love you. I am peeling back my skin, layer by layer, so you will finally know everything inside me.
  • Seth Bingohas quoted6 years ago
    She tries to walk not too fast and not too slow. She doesn’t want to attract any attention. She pretends she doesn’t hear the whistles and catcalls and lewd comments. Sometimes she forgets and leaves her house in a skirt or a tank top because it’s a warm day and she wants to feel warm air on her bare skin. Before long, she remembers. She keeps her keys in her hand, three of them held between her fingers, like a dull claw. She makes eye contact only when necessary and if a man should catch her eye, she juts her chin forward, makes sure the line of her jaw is strong. When she leaves work or the bar late, she calls a car service and when the car pulls up to her building, she quickly scans the street to make sure it’s safe to walk the short distance from the curb to the door. 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.”

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