We owe her the praise of imperfect feminism (bad feminism). So with this new novel (Difficult Women), Roxane Gay this time gives a voice to all imperfect women. Imperfect because different, torn, broken. Often abused. Exploited. Totally violated. Difficult, what. Hello understatement.
Posted at 4:00 p.m.
Accuracy : Difficult Women, a series of 21 stories of women with “difficult” paths, therefore (because either “easy”, “frigid”, “crazy”, “mothers” or downright “dead”, specifies a chapter devoted to the subject), n’ isn’t really a new novel. Published in English in 2017, it has just been translated into French. And the texts that compose it were actually written more than 10 years ago.
Why so long? The publishers have undoubtedly been cautious, confided in 2017 the author, essayist and professor who now makes the crowds run, in an interview with the vogue. The texts here present are indeed “too dark and depressing”, she admitted. “But it’s totally intentional!” »
It is said. And it is a fact. Be warned: we do not read Difficult Women in one stroke. It’s too much: too heavy, too hard, too true, too. Because Roxane Gay stages all kinds of women with torturous lives (one thinks of these two broken sisters, raped in their childhood), sometimes surreal (like this woman married to a mean man, whose twin brother seduces her in his bed ), even downright fantastic (the glass woman, married to the stone thrower, or this other, literally pursued by a cloud of rain). Lots of disturbing images, emotions and feelings. And it stirs, indeed.
We remain inhabited for a long time by the story of this mother who lost her child, and who drowns her infinite pain in an unhealthy relationship. With a violent stranger. But in consent. “I was using one pain to cover another…” It’s chilling.
All these women imagined by Roxane Gay are marginalized, often exploited, damaged. Attacks are almost ubiquitous. Like a fatality. But it’s not free. In fact, the violence serves rather as a pretext to explore their resilience. All of this, fortunately, through spaces here and there of sorority, solidarity, frank friendship. And love too. No, it’s not all over.
We file the novel thinking that the title is ultimately very badly chosen. It’s not so much difficult women that we’re talking about. But rather men (husbands, brothers, fathers). Equally disturbed. And downright disturbing.
Difficult Women
Roxane Gay (translated by Olivia Tapiero
inkwell memory
339 pages