I spoke with Gay via email about Difficult Women, the short story form, her writing life, and the challenges of completing her new memoir, Hunger, due later in 2017. Her erudition and ardor always strive for connection, and her blunt stories are anchored by curiosity and emotional depth while avoiding the maudlin, or needlessly grotesque plots. The book includes the seminal stories “North Country,” “I Am A Knife,” and “Break All The Way Down.” Each word and every sentence in Difficult Women invites instead of repels the reader. This leads to miscommunication, for lack of a better word, played out within Gay’s Twitter timeline, where fans and trolls alike commune for kind words or invective or impromptu requests for some kind of labor - intellectual, literary, even emotional - offering to young writers a glimpse of what literary stardom looks like, the necessity to remain, with restrictions, accessible to fans while protecting one’s private life.įollowing the critical and commercial successes of her debut novel, An Untamed State, and her essay collection Bad Feminist, both published in 2014, Gay returns with Difficult Women, from Grove Press, a collection of short fiction that solidifies Gay as a writer just as committed to technique as she is to storytelling itself. Gay is always relevant and often correct, which not only explains, to some small degree, her popularity among fans across genres and aesthetics - from her new Marvel comic to co-writing a film adaptation of her debut novel - but also makes her opinion a highly-desired commodity, even if the matter at hand is of little significance or relevance to Gay.
To Gay, the Fast and the Furious movie franchise is as worthy of intellectual consideration as any obscure tome exhumed to brace esoteric points.
Few contemporary writers are called upon to render opinions more often than author Roxane Gay, a consequence of amassing a readership through, among other ways, critiquing the culture at large with generous, entertaining essays, independent of the topic.