There are moments of levity in these stories, but there are just as many dark turns. In the same story, women also beat the crap out of each other, à la fight club, because they “…are pretty and fucked up, girls who keep their ugly beneath the skin where it belongs, even though sometimes, it’s hard to keep it all in.” One of the most memorable cases is found in “Baby Arm,” in which a couple gets turned on by (and use) a fiberglass baby arm. It was too much, the falling water, the decay everywhere.”Ĭontinuing with the fantastical, “Requiem for a Glass Heart” centers on a woman made entirely of glass, with moments of excellent description: “As she catches her breath, she can often hear her heart threatening to implode with the high-pitched lamentation of glass succumbing to pressure.” The female characters in Gay’s stories aren’t limited to flesh and blood, nor are they any one way, in terms of personality they enjoy their bodies, their desire and of course, sex.ĭifficult women like having sex, and not the polite, quiet kind. In “Water, All Its Weight,” for example, a woman literally can’t escape the element, which ends up ruining her marriage: “Dean couldn’t handle the watery rot that followed Bianca. Realistic storylines and hard themes like the effects of abuse, body insecurities, and trauma are present, but there’s also an element of playfulness steeped in fairytales and magical realism. Not so for Gay-in fact, she dedicates the book to them, stating: “For difficult women, who should be celebrated for their very nature.”Īs with her novel, An Untamed State, and book of essays, Bad Feminist, Gay is not afraid to explore taboo subjects, ruminate on the nebulous idea of womanhood, and develop complex characters that stick with you for days. In the context of modern-day society, being “difficult” is often taken as an insult or a character flaw, something less than desirable. One of the central questions raised in Roxane Gay’s newest collection of short stories, Difficult Women, is what it means to be labeled as such.

Difficult Women by Roxane Gay