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These stories were written long before our current political situation, but they read like responses. In “How,” about an economically depressed northern Michigan community, there’s the line: “It has been 15 years since the mine was closed, but Red still calls himself a miner.” “Noble Things” is a portrait of a family in a future America where the Southern states have once again seceded from the Union. There are stories in here that felt eerily prescient.
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I definitely struggle with the question of how to write about it in fiction.
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Has your thinking on this evolved since you wrote these stories? I have definitely just tried to be ethical in terms of writing about sexual violence. Rape culture, the question of representation of violence against women, trigger warnings-it’s such a major conversation now. It’s also part of your novel, and something you’ve personally experienced and written about.
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Sexual violence, as you acknowledge, plays a role in many of these stories. When I’m writing nonfiction, of course I do. I’m thinking about feminism, bodies, sexual violence, relationships, and the like. I think because of my own personal interests you can see connections between my fiction and my nonfiction. So when I’m writing fiction, I’m not thinking about “issues” that I want to tackle. I wrote many of these stories well before I ever wrote an essay. In this collection there’s a short story (“Best Features”) about a woman who is overweight and how she thinks about it. Are you working things out in fiction before you tackle them in nonfiction? You’ve tweeted, for example, that your forthcoming memoir, Hunger, which is about your relationship to eating and your body, was particularly difficult to write. It means you have found your voice.Įlements of these stories call to mind autobiographical details, which you’ve written about in essay form. Often we write the same story over and over, in slightly different ways. To look at the stories, I can definitely see: Oh, girl, what were you doing?īut I think that writers have obsessions. A lot of these themes are just around what was going on in my life at the time. Most of these stories were written between 20, when I was going to graduate school in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which is deer country.
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In compiling them, were there obsessions that became clear to you? I noted a lot of recurring motifs: twins deer knives mold water. If having a personality and having opinions makes me difficult, then yes, I am very difficult. Have you ever been referred to as a difficult woman? Oh, definitely. We talked more about Gay’s outlook on 2017 and beyond, and about the stories in Difficult Women: dark, yes, difficult, yes, but also luminous, transporting, and totally worth the effort. It’s like: Why so dark? I mean, have you seen the world? It’s an appropriate response.” “But when women write dark, all of a sudden it’s a thing. Dark stories, then, reflect dark times? “Men write dark stories all the time, and rarely is that darkness obsessed over,” she offers. “I think books come out when they’re supposed to, even if they don’t come out when you want them to,” Gay insists. She shelved the project until the success of An Untamed State, and Bad Feminist allowed her to revive it. “I told one, ‘That’s exactly what I’m going for.’” “A lot of editors thought it was too dark and depressing,” she remembers. Difficult Woman proved difficult to sell. These stories actually predate all that: She wrote them mostly during her days as a graduate student at Michigan Technological University on the Upper Peninsula.