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His office has a small closet where he keeps urban clothing he sends his assistant to West Baltimore to purchase-Sean John jeans and Phat Farm hoodies and Timberland boots. When he’s not watching his housekeeper, William listens to his music and repeats the lyrics about skeeting and Beckys and backing that ass up and living the gangasta life. It is not the subtlest story I’ve ever read, although there is something convincingly, pathologically pathetic about Livingston’s secret forays into the hood aesthetic: One of her regular clients is a man named William Livingston III, a white guy from a Southern family for whom blood purity is an unshakable tenet of the universe, but who also has a fetishising obsession with street culture, African-American music, and black women’s bodies. She’s mixed-race but has white features and straight Caucasian hair. “La Negra Blanca” is a story about Sarah, who strips to pay her way through college and who goes by “Sierra” while she’s working.
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The worth of women is another recurring theme in this collection, often intertwined with race and class. Every night, I went online and checked my account balances and thought, This is what my life was worth.
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The jury awarded us a lot of money, so much money we would never have to work or want. The narrator recalls the settlement they were awarded by a jury, after Mr. Peter’s van just before the door closed-”I couldn’t leave my sister alone,” she says when asked why she did this. Carolina, instead of running for help, jumped into Mr. Slowly, the secret of their past is revealed: the younger sister was kidnapped as a child by a paedophile known to them only as Mr. The narrator here follows her older sister, Carolina, to Nevada, where Carolina’s husband Darryl works. There are other stories, like the first one, “I Will Follow You”, where a happy ending is contingent and constantly marked by the shadow of the past. Those stories have happy endings, more or less, endings where people meet their trauma on their own terms and force it into a shape they can handle. Another, “North Country”, follows a light-skinned black academic as she moves to a Northern town, fields constant queries about where she’s from Detroit (why else, her white neighbours assume, would a black person be in Michigan?), and lets go of her protective carapace enough to fall in love with a woodsy guy called Magnus. Several of them are set in Michigan one of my favourites, “How”, is about a woman of Finnish descent, Hanna, who finally shucks off the thankless life she has lived in the service of her parents and husband, in favour of escape with her sister and her female lover. Many of them work through their damage by demanding to be hurt: rough sex, verbal abuse, slapping, choking. Many of these protagonists conceive a child and lose it, through miscarriage or tragic accidents. Many of these stories feature sexual abuse, rape or molestation. In Difficult Women, she circles the same thematic territory over and over again. One of the great significances of Gay as a writer is how she affirms that they are. Plenty of critics, I think, have been taught that women, let alone sad women, let alone sad women fucking, aren’t serious subjects. They don’t mean it in a pejorative way, though, which is good because Gay’s stories shouldn’t be patronised or belittled just because they are, in fact, about sad women having sex. Someone on Goodreads wrote that this book could be equally well titled “Sad Women Having Sex.” They’re not wrong. She was smart enough to want more but tired enough to accept the way things were. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.