Difficult Women is a literary fiction book by author Roxane Gay.
The book was a bestseller in The New York Times.
It’s about Difficult Women, a collection of stories of rare strength and beauty, of troubled lives, passionate love, and the odd human connection and grievances. .
The women in these stories live lives of privilege and poverty, marriages both in love and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. A pair of sisters, now grown, have been inseparable since they were kidnapped together as children and had to negotiate the marriage of the eldest.
A woman married to twins pretends not to recognize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper is in college to fend off the advances of an overzealous client. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan to apply for a job and must face the malevolent curiosity of his colleagues and the difficulty of letting go of his past. From a girls’ fight club to an affluent Florida subdivision where neighbors obey, compete, and spy on each other, Gay offers a haunting, beautiful vision of water. Modern America is reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro and Miranda July.
