by Tana Tymesen

Roxane Gay’s stories highlight women of supreme independence and ambition, women bold enough to feel lonely in the presence of men and radical enough to ferociously love themselves and other women.

Difficult Women is for readers for whom the middle class ennui of the bored is unfamiliar. It is a collection of tales of individual women who, in real life, would probably classify themselves as “hard to love” because that’s what society tells us they are. They struggle for control in some area of their lives. They have every reason to be difficult: they’ve miscarried, been raped, been abandoned, lost children to tragic accidents, or suffered selfish men for too long. They have been fetishized or conferred to second- and third-tier status because they are Black, biracial, queer, or sex workers.  

It’s refreshing to read a blatantly feminist text; women characters written by a woman for women, in plain, unadorned language. Even better, it’s a text by a woman who loves women, in plain, unadorned language.

Gay doesn’t shy from difficult topics, instead it seems she takes them on because so few others are given the platform to do so. She uses her pen to give voice to those who are most often voiceless, to shape grief and trauma with words. Representation matters, and in these pages there are visions of a multitude of women.  

Gay’s public persona, no-holds-barred, no-fucks-given, unapologetic intersectional feminism, will take into stride her commentary on the contemporary man. For every man like “North Country’s” Magnus, a hulking Norseman who is the picture of staid, stereotypical northern European patience and wisdom gleaned from a thin life lived in nature, there are three more who lead the reader to think in all-caps: THERE IS NEVER A PLACE WE GET TO HAVE TO OURSELVES. They are thoughtless, inconsiderate animals, living alongside the rare men who give the women in their lives space to breathe, and hurt and be angry. But those rare men allow Gay to differentiate herself from men who’ve written one-dimensional women since time immemorial. Rather than make excuses for the terrible men, they offer hope that honest, sincere, loving men exist and can love shattered women. Ben, in “Break All the Way Down,” doesn’t fight his wife’s need for a boyfriend after the death of their child tears her apart. Her need to grieve outwardly is accepted and forgiven by him. “‘Enough,’ he said. ‘You’ve broken yourself enough. You’re coming home.’”

It’s impossible to determine when Gay is at her strongest, because every story has moments that knock the wind out of you. She has a keen awareness of the intricacies of women exorcising their demons through sex and physical abuse, often accompanied by the other. The narrator in “Break All the Way Down” takes the boyfriend and the abuse at his hands. “I made myself into meat for him. He threw me onto the bed and started unbuckling his belt…I said nothing. He did not need my voice…He clasped my throat and squeezed harder and harder, leaving his mark. I held his gaze. I waited for him to punish me and when he did, it was perfect relief.”

 

When, at last, she returns to Ben, she begs him to hit her and he refuses. They find a new way to exorcise their shared grief, allowing them to seek a new life together.

Her husbands are good and terrible, and men strong and steady as trees. They are deeply flawed, children, moochers, drunks, abusers, cheaters and sleaze bags. The men get more dimension than women often do when written by men, and the picture is largely cynical — but it’s also overwhelmingly realistic and not simply a commentary on the state of intellectual discourse on men at this point in time.

Where many of Gay’s stories live in a space out of time, she excels at distilling the current cultural thought around race and gender. With deft strokes she telegraphs racial micro aggressions when one character, a PhD candidate at a university in Michigan, is the only Black woman in the room, and her peers and colleagues continuously assume she’s from Detroit (she’s from Florida). Gay travels between real and fantastical worlds with ease, a feat made more possible through her medium. She plays with form and format, and the stories at times feel like field notes in a sociological study. She’s comfortable with Others, not only Black women, but also biracial women, women made of glass, people from rural and/or poor backgrounds, and women who don’t act or feel the way society has determined women should act and feel.

The collection kicks off with “I Will Follow You,” a tale of two sisters who were kidnapped as children and assaulted until their escape. The narrator remembers, that rather than run away, her older sister “ran right toward the van, threw her little body in beside us, her face screwed with concentration.” When they’re later reunited with their parents, the sister’s reason for jumping into the van instead of running for help is simple: “I couldn’t leave my sister alone.”

This is only the first story in which Gay bluntly confronts sexual assault and its aftermath, and tells the reader immediately she will pull no punches in the ensuing pages. Her descriptions of the capture and trial are visceral; the reader feels the physical effects when the narrator says of testifying in front of her abductor, “My words rotted on my tongue.” She explores the solitude in trauma, and examines how that solitude changes when trauma is shared. While each sister bears the extreme burden of what happened to them, and find their own daily ways of coping, they are able to live through the tragedy by sharing the pain with the other person.

That, ultimately, is the crux of Difficult Women: clusters of women and people caring for each other under harsh and occasionally unnatural circumstances. She sees possibility in extreme situations, hope where hate threatens to take over, light where darkness often prevails.   

 

Gay’s women are tireless but exhausted; terrified and brave. The women, largely, have each others’ backs. They remind us to forgive ourselves, they love us when we can’t deal. Her main characters are a welcome antidote to the kind of woman that tends to inhabit short fiction written by women; They are thoughtful, internal, and calm. Her stories are reminiscent of Raymond Carver’s but better, because they’re not about men who can’t function and who mistreat women either through lack of communication or being terrible people.   

Difficult Women is a wink at women who’ve been told all their lives that they are too much because they have the gall to have feelings and opinions, to take up more space than we are told is allowed. By reflecting in these pages women whose experiences are visceral and very real, Gay offers validation and redemption for those who wouldn’t have needed to seek redemption if society accepted women across race and class as whole people capable of a range of feelings and experiences. The collection is catharsis. Read it with a cup of coffee and some tissues, and try not to highlight 3/4 of each page when your heart aches with recognition.   

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Tana Tymesen is a writer and editor from the Midwest and both coasts. Her self-care includes long drives through rural Wisconsin, Instagrams of piglets, cheeses, and Bob’s Burgers. You can find more of her writing at tangentsandangles.com