Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
(Format used for this read: Print–paperback)
My monthly book club is a group of VERY different women…we are NOT linear at ALL….
We all bring various perspectives and voices to our discussions…which is why I love it so so much!
One trait we all share though is that we ABSOLUTELY LOVE READING.
Like we are all HUUUUGE “book nerds”.
Most of us read WAY more than our one designated “book club” book per month….
We have a basket that makes it to *most* meetings where we will drop in books we have enjoyed and others in the group can trade and borrow.
This title has been on my list for awhile now….and I can’t even remember who or what suggested it to me (podcast? friend? blog? I have a list of 100s of “must reads” constantly going in my phone so I forget who tells me what!)…so when Candice dropped it in our book basket a few meetings back, I happily snatched it up.
Here is the quick summary:
A national bestseller from the “prolific and exceptionally insightful” (Globe and Mail) Roxane Gay, Difficult Women is a collection of stories of rare force that paints a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America.
Difficult Women tells 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 have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and, grown now, 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 gives voice to a chorus of unforgettable women in a scintillating collection reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Anne Enright, and Miranda July.
Okay….so….loooots of thoughts in my head about this read yall….
First thing I need to get off of my chest about this book is that I had ABSOLUTELY NO EFFING CLUE how very DARK and DISTURBING many of these stories were!
There was A LOT of violence in this book.
A LOT.
There was sexual violence…emotional violence…physical violence…mental violence…
Not just done TOWARDS women but also done BY women…
The most painful to read about was the kind women did to themselves.
I will say that the violence in many of these stories did have a specific purpose in developing the character’s personality, describing family dynamics or showcasing why the enviornment & circumstances surrounding the character were what they were.
Sometimes there was even a deeper less literal metaphor awaiting underneath the descriptive acts.
But I have a VERY VERY tough time reading about violence of ANY kind.
I knew all of these stories were fiction BUT they are REALISTIC fiction…
I had SUCH a hard time getting thru that.
**This will be a good time for me to give yall a TRIGGER WARNING…if you have experienced violence of ANY kind, this could be a VERY hard read for you. If you are considering reading it, then please do a little more research on it before diving in.**
Roxanne Gay is an extremely powerful, raw, intentional and graphic author…which is also why I had a hard time reading about the violence….she really does write in a way that you feel transfixed and intrigued.
So…the first half of the book I was trying REALLY hard to just get thru it…
I kept hoping that the next story would be easier to absorb than the last.
Right past the halfway mark thru these stories, I am glad to tell you that it got easier for me to absorb.
She does not fill your head with sweet little fables with happy endings….she makes that brain of yours think and that heart of yours feel…and really makes you reevaluate traits and traumas of being a woman of various backgrounds and experiences in this country.
This book is not about women who ARE difficult…but about women who EXPERIENCE difficult.
And those are VERY different things.
The one story in the first part of the book that I did enjoy and find thought provoking was actually a story that gave this book it’s title…named “Difficult Women.”
In the few pages of this story it catalogues various misogynistic “types” of women…titles like “loose”, “frigid”, “crazy”…. and has various explanations of each category with titles such as : “What a Loose Woman Sees In The Mirror”, “What a Frigid Woman Wears”, and “Why a Crazy Woman Is Misunderstood”.
It is revealed that nothing is what it appears to be…and men really have no right to tell a woman who she is, how she should act, or judge her for her actions….but their actions can also can be held responsible for all those things as well.
At the tail end of this book, there is another story that really sat with me entitled “Noble Things”.
This story takes place after a speculative second Civil War in modern day America. It is about a white man, Parker, whose family are “Southerners thru and thru”, all male generations having fought to preserve “heritage and legacy”. Him and his wife, Anna, do not share the family’s views, yet he continues to remain silent about his opposition.
The struggles of Parker of being complicit to ideals he does not believe in and committed to a family he does not agree with are dug into deeply….and the author lays out quite a chilling image in the closing sentences.
My final thoughts on this book:
I have mixed emotions about it.
I REALLY had a tough time stomaching some of the stories.
But I also really liked a few of them too.
I can 100 percent say I really appreciate her creative vision and respect her radical honesty in her storytelling method.
Is it worth checking out?
I think so….just tread lightly.