And I’m back! So, since I’m writing a lot at the moment, but I don’t want to share too much just yet, I thought I’d come back with some words on some of the books I’ve been reading lately in the meantime.
First up is an incredible collection of short stories by Roxane Gay (author of Hunger, Bad Feminist & An Untamed State), Difficult Women. I had never heard of Gay before reading this collection, but it’s safe to say that her other works are now on the top of my list. Difficult Women is a collection of stories on women, all women. Gay pieces together a patchwork of narratives that reveal the stories of the kinds of women that don’t usually make into conventional fiction. The environments and experiences of these women are usually those that are avoided as well, which makes the entire read somewhat uncomfortable. However, I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, in fact its quite the contrary. Gay goes out of her way to make you uncomfortable in order to understand. Subjects like rape, kidnapping, cheating, fighting, and grief shouldn’t be spoken about under a sugar coated glaze, otherwise their impact is lost. The women you encounter in this collection are raw, real, and while you might not find yourself between the pages there’s something in every one of them that speaks to women as a whole. Viewing experiences that are so far from my daily life was shocking, but elements of what life is like as a women in today’s world struck home in a way that I never expected.
From a wife sharing her husband with his twin brother, though both think she doesn’t know, to a stripper with mixed heritages, and still further to a woman still recovering from the loss of her small child, the women are difficult, complex, and above all real. As someone who only recently got into short stories (I used to find them annoying because of the fact that they rarely give you any kind of satisfaction or conclusion), this was the collection that made me realise what I’ve been missing. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that there were a few stories that worked a kind of fantasy or magical realism into the lives of these women. Though they might not be the stories highlighted by most critics of this book, I found that these stories were the ones that stuck with me the most, perhaps because there is a lot more ambiguity in these stories. The story that got me into the book was one of the first in the collection, Water It’s Weight, which is a short narrative piece on a woman who has always been followed by water; damp mould that forms above her all the time. After that story, I found myself searching for others that might carry the same strange, unsatisfying, (see I’m learning to love this!) impact. Others that stuck out for me were I Am a Knife, Requiem for a Glass Heart, and (particularly) Sacrifice of Darkness.
Over all, Gay’s collection is an incredible look into the life of women. While you might not identify with the women on these pages, I think that these difficult women deserve to be heard. They’re the dirty, gritty stories that we don’t want to hear, and don’t like to think about, but they also represent many voices that never make it to the mainstream.
Difficult women, crazy women, loose women, mothers, lovers.
Unforgettable women.
Francesca Sleet 