The next person who asks if she’s from Detroit – an Upper Peninsula (white) logger who lives in a trailer in his sister’s back yard – pursues the narrator and, in this - the most romantic and lest violent of her stories - becomes her faithful, if unlikely, friend and lover.Įven if the reader knows nothing about Roxane Gay’s rape by a group of boys at age 12, which she writes about in Bad Feminist, her recurrent, insistent theme of sexual self-punishment signals to the reader the after-effects of trauma. They will nod and exhale excitedly and ask about my tribe.” Shortly after that, I will begin telling people I have recently arrived from Africa. In a month, I will stop counting, having reached a four-digit number. “I have been asked this question twenty-three times since moving to the area. The narrator hasn’t yet divulged that she is brown-skinned and the reader is, at first, puzzled by the recurrent assumption that the “double novelty” can only have come from Detroit. ‘Are you single?’ they ask….I am the only woman in the department and, as such, I am a double novelty.” ‘You’re going to love this cruise,’ they say. My colleagues, all civil engineers, wave to me. I have just moved to the Upper Peninsula to assume a post-doc at the Michigan Institute of Technology. At the dock, there’s a long line of ruddy Michiganders chatting amiably about when they expect the first snow to fall. “If I am not careful, I will fall….I arm myself with a flask, a warm coat, and a book. “I have moved to the edge of the world for two years,” Gay begins the love story “North Country.” She is on a cruise of Lake Superior. Even the most distressing of these stories are narrated in a deceptively casual voice that blends piercing observation, judicious reflection, recurrent accounts of graphic sex, and sly humor. What’s not run-of-the-mill is Gay’s voice. They are largely set in run-of-the-mill American locales that have not received much literary attention. They portray varieties of unconventional love and violence between men and women, women and women, parents and children, friends and siblings, and make us look at the interconnections between race, gender, class and levels of education. Her best stories are stunningly powerful. Gay is a bold writer of impressive range who experiments with magic realism, dystopia, and fantasy in addition to writing in a straightforward realistic style.
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It’s a collection that is both spectacular and uneven, best read in small doses. In fact, Gay had been steadily garnering a readership of her fiction and non-fiction in small literary magazines and on websites such as The Rumpus, Jezebel, and Salon for 20 years.ĭifficult Women brings together 21 of these stories. Roxane Gay, the 42-year-old author, cultural critic, university professor, prolific tweeter and blogger, seemed to have burst onto the literary scene out of nowhere in 2014 with two well-received books: the novel An Untamed State and a collection of essays titled Bad Feminist. Roxane Gay is a bold writer of impressive range who experiments with magic realism, dystopia, and fantasy.ĭifficult Women by Roxane Gay.