Difficult women by roxane gay

Together, the books offer some of the best writing from any contemporary American writer. After two years since her last book published, she gives us a long anticipated collection of short stories. Do you identify most as any one kind of writer? Roxane Gay: I identify primarily as a fiction writer though the work I am most well known for is nonfiction.

Fiction is my first love. Where did the title come from? The women in my stories are messy and complicated. They face difficult situations and make difficult choices. Difficult Women felt like the perfect title to hold the spirit of these stories. What inspired this story? When I write, there is rarely some grand statement I am trying to make.

This story was simply a story about a girl who is followed, haunted by water and its weight.

REVIEW: Difficult Women – Roxane Gay

How does this kind of self-work translate to your writing? I try. Roxane Gay: The stories in this collection are in one way or another all about public womanhood, and how women have to deal with private sorrows and pains in a very public world. Rarely are women given space for how they hurt, and I suppose this collection interrogates that to some extent.

Roxane Gay: When I was younger, writing about trauma while having survived trauma was cathartic, and useful in helping me to come to terms with what I endured. This is not the whole of my work, though. Trauma is just one aspect of what I am drawn to as a fiction writer. Her memoir, Hunger, is forthcoming from Harper.

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