Difficult Women

Difficult Women (2017) is a collection of short stories by American writer and academic Roxane Gay. The 25 stories of this volume feature female characters from all walks of life as they navigate the complexities of the human condition, the mysteries of love and loss, and the universal yearning for connection. Trauma is a uniting theme that threads through most of the stories, underscoring larger issues of violence against women and the dangers women face in modern-day America. Difficult Women was a national bestseller.

In each of the stories collected here, Gay profiles a particular woman as she faces difficulty in her life. Some of these difficulties concern romantic relationships, others sisterly and mother bonds, still others the peculiar intricacies of female friendship. These women come from various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, but their shared struggles connect them, as does the touch of magical realism that Gay infuses into most of their stories.

Among the tales is the opening piece, "I Will Follow You." A young woman recounts the kidnapping and sexual assault she and her sister endured at the hands of a pedophile. What they live through stuns them into terrorized silence, even years after their release. As adults, the trauma manifests in new ways, mostly as each woman's acceptance of the dysfunctional men in their lives.



In "Water, All Its Weight," Gay tells the tale of Bianca, a girl cursed to have water follow her wherever she goes. As a result, she leaves rot and decay in her wake, eventually leading to the breakup of her marriage. Now, she must come to terms with this strange affliction—and perhaps start to see it as a gift.

The volume's title story contains multiple short profile-like pieces of different female characters. Gay categorizes them by "type" of woman—"crazy," "frigid," "loose," "mothers," etc.—but it is clear that this is not how Gay labels these women, but how society has long forced women into predefined and predetermined roles, even when they don't fit comfortably into any neat category. We see that anyone, of any gender, is more than a categorical underpinning; we are as messy as we are glorious, as scarred as we are whole, and as wronged as we are triumphant.

The story "Florida" takes place in a posh Sunshine State subdivision, where a group of wealthy women, each from a different background and place in life, must confront the reality of living in such a materialistic setting. With such an emphasis on status and symbols, the women wile away their days devoting themselves to what is essentially a high-class brothel.



In "La Negra Blanca," a mixed-race woman pays for medical school by stripping. She soon meets a sexual predator, who brutally rapes her. Her friends urge her to go to the police to report the assault, but she refuses. She cites as her reasons her utter physical and emotional exhaustion and the emptiness she feels inside—all of which seem to her to now be a permanent part of who she is.

"North Country" centers on an African American woman who takes a position as a civil engineer at a rural Michigan college. She recently lost a child and is still trying to come to grips with the death. She meets a kind local man, but her grief is so fresh, and the casual racism at her job so overwhelming, that she wonders if she will ever truly be able to open to anyone again.

In "Requiem for a Glass Heart," the central character is made entirely of glass. She meets a man made of glass, and they start a family together. Symbolizing the frailty that goes hand in hand with any relationship, any baring of the body and soul, the story speaks to the overarching human condition that every one of us, to some extent, possess a heart of glass.



A mother reels from the death of her infant son in "Break All the Way Down." She leaves her husband, then returns to him, begging him to enact violence upon her. He will not grant her the "punishment" she requests, leaving her feeling increasingly frantic at not being able to vent all the pent-up anger and guilt she feels over her son's death.

These are just a sampling of the short fiction pieces that make up Difficult Women. Gay presents a bounty of different lives and different experiences, some jarringly real, others touched by mysticism, but all reflective of the glories and the challenges of being a woman in the world today. There are no easy answers for any of the women in these stories. They are forging their own paths and finding their own happily-ever-afters, whatever that means for them. We are just witnessing them during one pivotal moment of their hero(ine)'s journey.