About The Book

Award-winning author 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). Gay 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’ 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, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July.

Praise

“The characters who inhabit Difficult Women . . . aren’t just characters. They are our mothers, sisters and partners. They are human. They are us . . . Gay manages to capture entire lifetimes, painstakingly sketching women, the underlying drives that give them their shape and the indignities that color the lenses through which they see the world. Gay’s style isn’t paint-by-numbers, either. It’s pointillism—and details such as race, class and sexuality are not missed. Gay has a deft touch with how those intersecting identities mold and shape women’s experiences . . . These are real stories about real experiences and women seeking, deserving happy endings. They aren’t victims but survivors. Gay makes mosaics out of these women, seeing them as perfectly imperfect wholes in a world that routinely tries to break them down to pieces.” —Jaleesa M. Jones, USA Today (4/4 stars)

“Gay has fun with these ladies. Her narrative games aren’t rulesy. She plays with structure and pacing . . . She moves easily from first to third person, sometimes within a single story. She creates worlds that are firmly realist and worlds that are fantastically far-fetched . . . With Difficult Women, you really have no idea what’s going to happen next.” —Gemma Sieff, New York Times Book Review

“Gay is a renowned cultural critic and woman of ideas—and the real gift to readers in Difficult Women is her ability to marry her well-known intellectual concerns with good storytelling . . . Her restrained and forthright style allows her to write sensual scenes with efficacy, grit and authority . . . Gay excels in her allowance for human complexity . . . One of the book’s greatest achievements is Gay’s psychological acuity in the creation of female characters who are teeming with dissonance and appealing self-awareness . . . In a dark and modern way, this collection celebrates the post-traumatic enlightenment of women.” —Megan Mayhew Bergman, Washington Post

Excerpt

My sister decided we had to go see her estranged husband in Reno. When she told me, I was in a mood. I said, “What does that have to do with me?”

Carolina married when she was nineteen. Darryl, her husband, was a decade older but he had a full head of hair and she thought that meant something. They lived with us for the first year. My mom called it getting on their feet but they spent most of their time in bed so I assumed getting on their feet was a euphemism for sex. When they finally moved out, Carolina and Darryl lived in a crappy apartment with pea green wallpaper and a balcony where the railing was loose like a rotting tooth. I’d visit them after my classes at the local university. Carolina usually wasn’t home from her volunteer job yet so I’d wait for her and watch television and drink warm beer while Darryl, who couldn’t seem to find work, stared at me, telling me I was a pretty girl.

When I told my sister she laughed and shook her head. She said, “There’s not much you can do with men but he won’t mess with you, I promise.”

Awards

Winner of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Fiction Award
Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize
Longlisted for The Story Prize
Nominated for the Bookish Award for Best Short Story or Essay Collection