She moves easily from first to third person, sometimes within a single story. 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. These are real stories about real experiences and women seeking, deserving happy endings. Gay has a deft touch with how those intersecting identities mold and shape women’s experiences. It’s pointillism-and details such as race, class and sexuality are not missed. Gay’s style isn’t paint-by-numbers, either. 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. They are our mothers, sisters and partners. “The characters who inhabit Difficult Women. 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. 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. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. 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.

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. 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. 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).

Difficult Women by Roxane Gay