![]() ![]() These are women coping with the harshness of their worlds, not always adaptively, but in ways that make sense. And while some of them are, they are also women who, in whatever way, keep going. Gay’s Difficult Women is about women who appear broken from the outside. The insight remains, but rather than presenting her reader with well-reasoned cultural criticism, she evokes an emotional landscape, or lack thereof. The themes of Difficult Women are the themes of Gay’s more political essays. She is trying to kill her mother, or at least the parts of her mother lurking beneath her own skin.” Rather, the subtitle, “Who a Loose Women Looks Up To,” is answered with the reflection, “Never her mother. Her voice, however, is no longer that of the essayist. In the title story, she describes the inner worlds of a range of “difficult women”: loose women, frigid women, crazy women, mothers, and dead girls. In Bad Feminist, she writes, “Feminism is flawed, but it offers, at its best a way to navigate shifting cultural climate.” Feminism is flawed, she argues, because “it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed.”ĭifficult Women, Gay’s new collection of short stories, remains concerned with many of the themes of multifaceted oppression, and with the flaws of the people who face those oppressions. As an essayist, Gay is incisive, sometimes journalistic, other times autobiographical, willing to call out a world in which inequity is omnipresent. Prior to Difficult Women, I knew Roxane Gay through her nonfiction. ![]()
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