Review: Difficult Women

Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Beautifully written collection of short stories about exactly what the title proposes: difficult women. Or, in the post Hillary Clinton era, Nasty Women. Women who are troubled and troubling. Women who are not supermoms, or supermodels, or perfect wives, or "cool girls."

To anyone who appreciates good writing about flawed characters, this collection is for you. However, I must offer a warning: it is dark. The subject matter is not uplifting, and there really is no reprieve to the heaviness of the content. The only way I'd recommend improving a collection like this is, honestly, to structure the stories to give it some rise and fall. Let some of the pieces be shorter and brighter, maybe add some comic relief in between the soul-twisters and the stories that make us cringe.

Nevertheless, an excellent collection. I hope to return to it again, as an older woman, and get something completely different out of the reading. I don't think I'll be disappointed.

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