Difficult Women

By: Roxane Gay

Narrated by: Robin Miles

Award-winning author and powerhouse talent Roxane Gay burst onto the scene with An Untamed State and the New York Times best-selling 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 delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July.

©2017 Roxane Gay. Produced by arrangement with Grove Atlantic (P)2017 Audible, Inc.

Unique

Not at all what I was expecting. But I loved it. Definitely a heavy book with lots of triggers.

Exquisitely done...

I really cannot say I enjoyed this but I am glad I listened to this book. It is as real as it gets - about all sorts of different women's experiences - differing perspectives. The pleasure, the pain, the good and the bad and the ugly. Raw and painful. So well done. Some surrealism and AU in here for good measure. Roxane Gay is a major force and it shows in this collection of stories. The narration is light and that lets the power shine through. Don't want to give anything away here. Do yourself a favor and read this collection.

Heartbreakingly honest.

I listened through the whole thing. I thought about my sisters, my friends, and my daughter. I thought about my clients and their mothers and daughters. It is a fierce thing to be female.

Challenging and powerful

Trigger warning: there are many uncomfortable topics explored but ultimately you come away with a new perspective on the definition of a difficult woman.

Intense!

I deeply admire Dr. Gay's writing and how unflinching she is in handling controversial topics. I'm down for anything she writes.