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“La Negra Blanca” is a story about Sarah, who strips to pay her way through college and who goes by “Sierra” while she’s working. The worth of women is another recurring theme in this collection, often intertwined with race and class. Every night, I went online and checked my account balances and thought, This is what my life was worth. The jury awarded us a lot of money, so much money we would never have to work or want. The narrator recalls the settlement they were awarded by a jury, after Mr. Peter’s van just before the door closed-”I couldn’t leave my sister alone,” she says when asked why she did this. Carolina, instead of running for help, jumped into Mr. Slowly, the secret of their past is revealed: the younger sister was kidnapped as a child by a paedophile known to them only as Mr. The narrator here follows her older sister, Carolina, to Nevada, where Carolina’s husband Darryl works. There are other stories, like the first one, “I Will Follow You”, where a happy ending is contingent and constantly marked by the shadow of the past. Those stories have happy endings, more or less, endings where people meet their trauma on their own terms and force it into a shape they can handle. Another, “North Country”, follows a light-skinned black academic as she moves to a Northern town, fields constant queries about where she’s from Detroit (why else, her white neighbours assume, would a black person be in Michigan?), and lets go of her protective carapace enough to fall in love with a woodsy guy called Magnus. Several of them are set in Michigan one of my favourites, “How”, is about a woman of Finnish descent, Hanna, who finally shucks off the thankless life she has lived in the service of her parents and husband, in favour of escape with her sister and her female lover.
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Many of them work through their damage by demanding to be hurt: rough sex, verbal abuse, slapping, choking. Many of these protagonists conceive a child and lose it, through miscarriage or tragic accidents. Many of these stories feature sexual abuse, rape or molestation. In Difficult Women, she circles the same thematic territory over and over again. One of the great significances of Gay as a writer is how she affirms that they are. Plenty of critics, I think, have been taught that women, let alone sad women, let alone sad women fucking, aren’t serious subjects.
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They don’t mean it in a pejorative way, though, which is good because Gay’s stories shouldn’t be patronised or belittled just because they are, in fact, about sad women having sex. Someone on Goodreads wrote that this book could be equally well titled “Sad Women Having Sex.” They’re not wrong. She was smart enough to want more but tired enough to accept the way things were. 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.įrom 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.Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. 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. 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 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.ĭifficult Women tells of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection.