Difficult women roxane gay
Difficult Women Quotes
“What a Crazy Lady Thinks About While Walking Down the Street She tries to walk not too fast and not too plodding. She doesn’t crave to attract any attention. She pretends she doesn’t overhear the whistles and catcalls and lewd comments. Sometimes she forgets and leaves her house in a skirt or a tank highest because it’s a warm day and she wants to feel warm atmosphere on her bare skin. Before prolonged, she remembers. She keeps her keys in her hand, three of them held between her fingers, like a dull claw. She makes eye contact only when necessary and if a man should collect her eye, she juts her chin forward, makes sure the line of her jaw is strong. When she leaves work or the bar belated, she calls a car service and when the ride pulls up to her building, she quickly scans the street to form sure it’s protected to walk the short distance from the curb to the door. She once told a boyfriend about these considerations and he said, “You are completely out of your mind.” She told a recent friend at labor and she said, “Honey, you’re not crazy. You’re a woman.”
― Roxane Gay, Complicated Women
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“I was too smart and that made people
Roxane Gay’s new book, Difficult Women, is a deeply moving collection of short stories that are by turns tender, heartbreaking, and chilling. Gay’s characters, “difficult” consideration they may be, are rendered with a profound sensitivity that affirms their humanity, alongside their wounds and flaws. Gay herself claimed an affinity for so-called “unlikeable characters” in a 2014 piece for Buzzfeed, describing them as “those who behave in socially unacceptable ways and tell whatever is on their consciousness and do what they want…and put themselves first without apologizing for it.”[1]
Difficult Women is replete with such complicated characters: women and men who make greedy and self-destructive decisions, often in response to past trauma. These stories explore the ongoing effects of that trauma in language both lyrical and intimate. In “North Country,” an African-American girl who recently lost a toddler during childbirth takes a employment as a professor in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where she finds love with a patient and plainspoken Yooper. The story details the many microaggressions she experiences in her mostly-white small town and conveys the way these actions weigh on her as she works
Difficult Women
Award-winning composer and livewire talent Roxane Gay burst onto the scene with the widely acclaimed novel An Untamed State and the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial). Queer returns with Difficult Women, a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, 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, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children and 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’ battle club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors c
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Praise
Be they writer, scientist, or stripper, Gay’s women experience grave abuses, mourn unfathomable losses, love hard, and work harder.
Booklist
Astonishing, arresting, and staggering.
Book Riot
Gay expands her writing prowess with this collection featuring colorful women protagonists . . . Refreshing yet intricate . . . This operate will appeal to lovers of literary and feminist fiction.
Library Journal, Starred Review
A powerful collection of compact stories about difficult, troubled, headstrong, and unconventional women . . . Whether focusing on assault survivors, single mothers, or women who drown their guilt in wine and terrible boyfriends, Gay’s fantastic collection is challenging, quirky, and memorable.
Publishers Weekly
Unified in theme—the struggles of women claiming independence for themselves—but wide-ranging in conception and develop . . . Male lover is an admirable risk-taker in her exploration of women’s lives and modern ways to tell their stories.
Kirkus Reviews