Rumpus: I noticed while reading Difficult Women that while there were many ‘defined’ characters, there were also many characters whose race wasn’t easily discernible. With the loss of her son, pain is what makes sense to her and so she keeps seeking pain out until she can handle feeling other things, until she can face what she has lost and the life she wants to get back to. Roxane Gay: The narrator is inconsolable in her grief. Do you feel that’s too optimistic of a reading?
I sensed some hope in this story, though, where, for the protagonist, being broken all the way down is what is needed for her to start to rebuild or even to conceptualize what rebuilding could look like. It felt to me like a theme in some of your stories, but particularly in this one, where the characters have been broken by various forces and they feel the need to be even more broken than they already are. I’m interested in the idea of breaking down. The Rumpus: I read “Break All the Way Down” at Joyland before it was in this collection and I think it’s such a stunning story. Gay and I corresponded by email, talking of rest, the bond of sisters, literary fame, and more. The thread that runs through it all is that these are stories about women, in all of the difficult, glorious, inexplicable forms that we take. There are stories about women who are trying to fill their empty places. There are stories about the sad, hard to explain things that are a function of being a woman.
There are stories about women who are broken, but surviving. In this newest collection, Difficult Women, there is a story about water following a woman wherever she goes. Her work encouraged me to think about my life and writing and people in a softer way. Gay’s work taught me what it can mean to be unapologetically vulnerable, to bear both your scars and unhealed wounds, and to be transparent about your desire to be better. I looked to her for guidance, for insight, for comfort. I have devoured her blog posts-at one point in my life, I read post after post until I got to the end of her blog during nights when I couldn’t fall asleep. Years later, I have read nearly every book she has ever written (with exception of the comic book-I haven’t yet gotten to that). Gay’s work is how I first learned about The Rumpus. 2017 promises at least one more book- Hunger, a memoir, is due out in June. Her short stories and essays have been published in well over sixty-five publications, and her writing has appeared in many ‘Best of’ collections. The publication of World of Wakanda makes her the first black woman to pen a Marvel comic book. Together, these feature a New York Times bestseller, a semifinalist in the 2015 Morning News Tournament of Books, a nomination for the NAACP Image Award for an Outstanding Literary Work in Fiction, and a forthcoming film by Gina Prince-Bythewood.
In the past six years, she has had five major works come out-a novel ( An Untamed State), two short story collections ( Ayiti and Difficult Women), an essay collection ( Bad Feminist), and the first installment of a new comic book series ( Black Panther: World of Wakanda).