Gay takes rewarding risks in form, placing traditional narratives about failed relationships alongside inventive stories that dive into surrealism ... the real gift to readers in Difficult Women is her ability to marry her well-known intellectual concerns with good storytelling ... We glimpse the slights and economic hardships these women endure and see how emotional damage manifests itself into hardened personalities and complicated relationships ... Gay excels in her allowance for human complexity. Trauma gives way to unusual pleasure, and healing might be found through more pain or submission ... One of the book’s greatest achievements is Gay’s psychological acuity in the creation of female characters who are teeming with dissonance and appealing self-awareness ... In a dark and modern way, this collection celebrates the post-traumatic enlightenment of women.
In these bittersweet lives, Gay finds fierce tenacity that bends but doesn’t always break ... Her writing is unfussy, well matched to the women and men she’s created, and she finds a distinct rhythm both elegant and plainspoken. This makes even uncommon situations relatable ... Because Gay is such a vivid writer, her stories have a remarkable visual sweep. She puts her readers there ... Gay writes of chances missed and unexpected joy, love gone awry or resurrected, and the slivers of hope that keep these fascinating women alive.
...deftly and terrifyingly underscores the absurdity of a society tacitly ordered by skin color and the privileges accrued by those who have ended up at the winning end, circled and watched by those who have not ... In other stories, Gay employs the surreal and allegorical to explore the contradictions of desire, of the yearning for motherhood and the cruelty that women can inflict on other women ... Difficult Women is a dark book, pulsing with repressed anger that emerges in sudden starts and with the accompaniment of violence...It takes courage to write such a book, to bank on un-likeability, on women unraveling in such a variety of ways. In reveling in this exposure of rage, Roxane Gay charts a markedly different literary course than is routinely allotted to the 'diverse' or 'minority' female author ... Gay peels it all back, exposing the raw, the enraged and the perversely beautiful.
The women here are complex, but not in the typical way of fiction. Much like Mireille, the protagonist of Gay’s profound and violent novel, An Untamed State, the women here reveal themselves in how their minds adjust to a world that seems bent on violating their bodies ... At their worst, the men here are pedophiles, rapists and sexists. At their best, they’re armchair chauvinists with occasional flares of the fist. (Which may make men the best audience for this book.) ... This collection begs for a slow, serious reading. Sure, some themes and scenes and gestures repeat. Maybe a handful of the stories could have been left out, but there’s too much richness to let that nettle.
Gay has fun with these ladies. Her narrative games aren’t rulesy. She plays with structure and pacing, breaking up some stories with internal chapterlets, writing long (upward of 20 pages) and very short (under two pages). She moves easily from first to third person, sometimes within a single story. She creates worlds that are firmly realist and worlds that are fantastically far-fetched ... Nearly every story in the collection features one or more bouts of ferocious sex during which shoulders and earlobes are gnawed and tongues half-swallowed ... The dialogue in Difficult Women occasionally falters, tending toward telegraphic language that broadcasts too tidily a character’s interiority.
Roxane Gay is razor sharp on the constant contradictions of being a woman — the terrible mundanity and the terrible violence of it all, and the way these two things rub up against each other so fondly ... These short stories have given Gay’s writing and ideas a way to transcend boundaries in a way Bad Feminist couldn’t and reveal her to be a writer as interested in form and language as she is in social commentary ... There’s a distinct echo of Angela Carter or Helen Oyeyemi at play; dark fables and twisted morality tales sit alongside the contemporary and the realistic, although the majority of them have some element of magic or the surreal at play ... The stories are frequently about sex or rape but are not titillating or gratuitous; they are harrowing and unflinching. The scenes of sexual violence feel relevant, raw and true to life ... The longer stories are almost always the most successful; managing to balance clever concepts with a more languid reveal. The very short, 'flash' stories can collapse a little under the weight of the one idea or line that birthed them.
In narratives that brush past as quickly as childhood, Gay manages to capture entire lifetimes, painstakingly sketching women, the underlying drives that give them their shape 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 ... 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.
Gay is a writer of formidable charm and intellect, with a knack for intriguing premises. She is especially masterful at writing striking openings ... Where there are flaws in individual stories, they are those one would expect from someone who is by temperament a popular writer. Gay’s language is powerful but sometimes careless, which can result in Fifty Shades prose...But we’re generally carried past these clumsy details by the force of Gay’s narrative voice ... In Difficult Women, abuse only occurs in the context of sex...Gay’s complex investment in this issue can produce fascinating results. But in most of the stories, the handling feels self-indulgent, even exploitative; it produces a torrid heat, but sheds no light.
If you grew up reading Harlequin romances or watching Disney princess movies, Gay’s collection might have the effect of a romantic cleanse. The stories suggest that the best way to love a difficult woman, or for a difficult woman to be loved, involves changing our ideals ... In this collection, Gay gives women license to be difficult, and their difficulty is expected, exalted and validated. Still, her characters seek out friendship, empathy, love and compassion. It might seem impossible to be refreshingly jaded, but that’s what Gay achieves.
...simply a collection of powerful, sometimes infuriating, often sad and always gentle stories about American women, with no apparent agenda ... Two other stories about women who’ve lost children are staggeringly heartbreaking; both women blaming themselves for the tragedies ... Gay’s writing is powerful; by turns gentle and angry, she is able to get at many truths about men and women, about relationships. The collection would have been stronger, however, without men in every story. Even in stories where women aren’t involved with men, those male relationships often take on an importance that the stories don’t require. I’d rather have seen her explore other relationships — with their children, parents, health, jobs — on their own, without a male figure in the background ... Gay’s book is a wonderful and varied collection of stories, with a terrific range of subjects and emotions giving it just the right balance.
...in these stories, [Gay] writes fearlessly and with insight about love and power between men and women, about the horror of sexual violence and its inescapable aftershocks, about the fierce and flawed tenderness of mothers for their children ... 'Strange Gods' is a heartbreaking, powerful tale of betrayal and assault and the long-lasting effects — and the courage it takes to live with them.
What binds Roxane Gay’s 21 short stories in Difficult Women is that they are told with direct, plainspoken intimacy — the same voice that makes her personal essays so compulsively readable. She takes a reasonable tone to convey erotic, graphic and wry observations about the ways people try to love each other. Although her stories play with form, diving into realism, magic realism, speculative, noir and experimental fiction, unimpeachable narration leaves a reader believing ... Gay treats the power dynamics of gender, economics and race with a clear-eyed sobriety regardless of whether everything else in the world of the story is tinged with magic ... An inclination to combine fairy tales with social critique is one that the author has followed since her small-press debut story collection Ayiti. Like Joyce Carol Oates’ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? or Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is fiction pressed through a sieve, leaving only the canniest truths behind. The addictive, moving and risk-taking stories of Difficult Women provide a release valve for our collective dark anxieties and fantasies.
Not all of Gay’s difficult women are as compelling at the rest...but every short story collection has highs and lows. And the highs in Difficult Women are pretty damn high. Taken together, the stories celebrate the condition of being difficult in the face of a world that is determined to hurt you. Because it is only the dead girls, Gay concludes in the title story, who are never called difficult.
...writing that seems to cut to the bone ... In their range you sense a writer trying things out: a one-paragraph story that barely fills two pages but nonetheless creates a world; forays into magic realism and fantasy; and the title story, an icily tongue-in-cheek guide to different types of 'difficult' — loose women, frigid women, crazy women, mothers, dead girls ... Though Gay can be hilariously funny in her other works, that humor isn’t much present here; this dark collection, with its literally and emotionally bruised narrators, isn’t one that you’ll want to read in one sitting. But these stories of sisters and mothers and daughters and lovers are haunting, and their quiet voices linger. Like the cover image — a heart made up of broken shards of glass — they draw you in, even as they might draw blood.
...[a] sharp, poignant and daring book ... The stories here are myriad, inviting comparisons to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie ... Gay turns these labels into building blocks for narrative. Her characters act the way they do because that is who they are, people with complicated, intensely individual lives and motivations. Messy, funny and beautiful, they are allowed, thanks to an author of extraordinary empathy, their humanity. The difficult women come to life.
Full of despair and deception, yet sprinkled with hope and strength, the author has created stories that, while not light-hearted, ultimately affirm to readers that whatever their personal experiences, they are not alone ... Ms. Gay’s prose is undeniably sharp and to the point. No words are wasted, and every story is nimbly brought to life with deft observations and a willingness to speak the truth about the pain and happiness that women experience. The bleak nature of many of the stories can become overwhelming; it is emotionally exhausting to be subjected to the various types of trauma that the heroines of Difficult Women face, so it may behoove the reader to take the stories a few at a time. Yet, even with the melancholy bent of this collection, Ms. Gay has crafted unforgettable characters and stories that make the journey worthwhile.
The themes of Difficult Women are the themes of Gay’s more political essays. The insight remains, but rather than presenting her reader with well-reasoned cultural criticism, she evokes an emotional landscape, or lack thereof ... While the vignettes are highly evocative, the longer stories are inherently more satisfying ... At times, Gay’s genre shifts are disorienting. While most of her stories are set in the quotidian world, some are anchored in alternate futures or are elaborately constructed metaphors ... Difficult Women, as its title suggests, is not easy or precisely pleasant reading. The collection is often dark and disturbing, but also deeply empathetic. In Gay’s attention to damage, she highlights survival, strength, and humanity. In her deliberate and often exquisite attention to detail, she crafts stories that will haunt the reader long after the book has been put away.
