Difficult Women

A story in this collection is called “I Am a Knife” and that’s what many of these stories feel like, knives. They’re sharp and focused, the result of a writer controlling her (considerable) powers.

There are multiple reviewers who are upset that this isn’t more like a self-help book, a collection of helpful and inspiring stories to fill readers with hope or show women who are doing it all and succeeding on multiple levels. It seems so odd to fault powerful writing for what you had hoped it would be, even when that representation was never made. I would say that this isn’t for everyone . . . and that’s okay.

Roxane Gay writes with a rawness that makes visceral the experience of many women – that their bodies are a battleground, sometimes acutely, but often on a day-to-dy basis as well. . Gay’s female characters all have the same conflicted…I can’t quite call it an attitude as it isn’t a matter of thinking…relationship to sex – they are sexual beings, but feel a lot of shame about sex, yet rather than avoid it, they seek pounding, punishing, often demeaning sex. All this complicated by the intersectionality of gender and race. It’s not an easy book, I’m afraid it may be put aside too soon by many b/c it’s possible to dismiss the women as f___ed up. But these are women we should listen to, sit with, allow ourselves to get beyond the prickly exterior and experience the wildly beating hearst inside.

The title is misleading and the book reads like trash television. This is the second book of Gays (the first being Bad Feminist-also misleading) that I stopped reading half way through because I felt it was an assault on my brain. With both of the books I half-read of Gays, I got a sense that she has limited real life experience and likely indulges in too much trashy reading and television which has warped her ability to write an authentic character. Much of the writing was cliche and lacking in depth or honesty. Roxane Gay is looking for the shock value to each story, which doesnt have anything to do with being a voice for women. Whats missing is the heart and feeling of each of the characters and many of the stories are left on odd points that lack inspiration to contemplate the story or the people in it. Instead the reader will most likely want to scrub it from their mind.

I read Hunger before any of Dr. Roxane Gays other works. Knowing more about her life makes her stories more personal to me, as she writes her own trauma and life into these difficult women. Difficult Women is a hard read. At times I had to excuse myself to the restroom to make sure I did not vomit. But between the lines there is great humor and irony to be found in the world. Gay does not deny that there are some good men in the world, but the stories are not really about them, for once. There are no real nice guys and no simple women. They are written with the complexity I understand can seem raw in a world where such complex, real women are hard to come by on a page. Not to mention the fact that she touches on race and culture with grace and calculated anger. So much is to be learned from Gays works, but it takes work and grit. It will be worth every moment.

If you look at the other reviews of this book, you’ll see that there are quite a few negative ones. Those people, I think, based on their reviews, hoped for more from this book because they seem to think that books and stories need happy endings.The stories within this book don’t generally have happy endings. Most of them don’t have endings or even beginnings. A lot of them, Gay plops us into the middle of these women’s lives with little to no explanation. You have to catch up. And that’s ok. These seem to be to me more of short stories. They are peeks into the lives of many different women. Their lives are hard, often sad. I think it’s a bit deeper than most actual situations or women actually read into their own lives, but they are generally very realistic situations. This book is full of tales of heart ache, sadness, emptiness, anger, love… The list goes on. Admittedly, some stories are a little harder to get through than others, but all in all, I’m very happy with my purchase, and I think others will be, too. Definitely a good pick to help me get back into reading the way I used to.

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