Difficult Women
Roxane Gay
Grove Press
There is a cherished tradition of rewriting fairy tales with a feminist bent. Difficult Women, Roxane Gay’s second story collection, does not participate in this tradition. While there are cameos from a glass woman and a woman followed by her own personal rain cloud, most of Gay’s titular women inhabit realms mundane in their familiar atrocities: the violence against women and racist microagressions are decidedly of this world.
Where the author innovates is with form – her stories span tens of pages or resolve in a few paragraphs – and in the centrality of their female characters’ experience. Women’s bodies are mutilated and scarred, yes, but they are not subsequently left in the woods for viewers’ titillation. Rather, they speak.
Unfortunately, many of these wounded bodies seem to be saying the same thing. Creating compelling female characters that don’t resort to the ‘strong female character’ trope is an imperative task, and one that Gay performs admirably. However, these women are so frequently masochistic; the sex is so ineluctably violent; and the babies so dead, unborn, or condemned to only existing as a disconnected compendium of mannequin parts, that Gay’s inventiveness turns to predictability. It is only when her storylines diverge from these broad strokes and hone in on visceral details that her ‘difficult’ women cease to be the stereotypes she intends to liberate them from.
Words – Mònica Tomàs White
