The story, which takes place in Zambia and features an alienating second-person narration, has a dreamlike quality to it, accompanied by descriptions of actual dreams involving, among other things, the protagonist chewing through a woman's throat with his teeth. As a summary moment, however, it feels appropriate, not just to the story in which it appears, but the volume as a whole. This occurs in what is flagged as an "epilogue," a somewhat unusual designation for a piece of short fiction. The final section of the final story in A Plea for Constant Motion features the unnamed protagonist burying a dog that has been mauled to death. If Difficult Women falters on the level of technique, the sophomore collection from Ottawa-based author Paul Carlucci is more assured in this regard. In Requiem for a Glass Heart, a man known only as "the stone thrower" falls in love with a literal glass woman, who reciprocates because he "was the first man who did not see through her." The Mark of Cain, about a woman who allows both her husband and his twin brother into her bed, ends on a note that is over-the-top and hokey. The tendency to explain what would be better left implied is on display here, as in La Negra Blanca, where an affluent white man's racial confusion and animus is reduced to bland exposition: "William sublimates his desires by listening to rap music." Elsewhere, obviousness or heavy-handedness results in a diminution of a given story's total effect. While the willingness to embrace heterodox approaches is admirable, Gay's fiction is too frequently constrained by her essayistic impulses. I Am a Knife includes a surreal birthing scene, and Requiem for a Glass Heart passes right over into allegory.
The title story comprises a compendium of attributes that demarcate various types of difficult women (the last two categories are "Mothers" and "Dead Girls"), while Open Marriage and A Pat form a pair of microfictions that resemble parables. Gay intersperses more traditionally "well-made" stories with those that employ less familiar tropes and tactics. First on the level of theme – the presentation of female sexual desire, both masochistic and otherwise, is vigorous and forthright, the language refreshingly frank and graphic – then on the level of technique. Provocation operates on different levels in this collection. "No one can hurt like a girl," says a character in a different story the speaker in this case is a member of a female fight club who shares a bond so intimate with the story's narrator she is allowed to eavesdrop on the latter in bed with her boyfriend. "You don't have to be soft with me," says Kate, the structural engineer at the centre of North Country, articulating a sentiment that courses throughout numerous stories in Difficult Women. The confrontational aspect carries over into her fiction. The approach is typical of the author, who in her essays has always shown herself keen to provoke, and to eviscerate unexamined assumptions. It's also a challenge: These are the places I'm going to take you, Gay seems to be saying. It's a clever tactic, which allows Gay to dramatize the situation without being exploitative, while at the same time implicating readers by forcing them to interrogate their own responses to the narrative elisions. Although the author mercifully spares her readers the details of the abuse, this has the paradoxical effect of making the situation appear that much more harrowing, as ample space is left to fill in the blanks. The opening story, I Will Follow You, focuses on a pair of sisters who, as preadolescents, were kidnapped and repeatedly raped by a sadistic pedophile. Roxane Gay, the acclaimed American essayist and novelist, charges from the gate in her debut collection of short fiction.