A Note on Essays as Memoir

I was super excited to read Roxane Gay after hearing some buzz, and one of my book club picks ended up being her essay collection Difficult Women.

So this essay collection was brutal. Like take-no-prisoners here-is-the-misery. My favorite essay was "North Country" because the writing was just beautifully sparse and evocative. Her straight-forward, short writing style in telling all these painful, emotionally-complex stories was sort of stoic, I guess is the word? What really struck me about halfway through the book were the similarities between almost every essay: grief, child loss, rape, self-harm, "twisted" relationships, general violence. After I finished the book I looked up Roxane Gay's bio and realized one of the final essays really was based on her own trauma.

I think it can be misleading to read too much into fictional text as a reflection of the author, but in this case I believe it's essential to appreciating the whole book. I interpreted it as each essay was an attempt to tell her own story, over and over again, concluding with the essay closest to her actual experience. It was like a kind of fictional PTSD (therapy?), re-living and re-interpreting and trying to find meaning in each new take on the same events. I don't know if this would be a literary version of therapy or the self-harm described in the stories, but it's definitely repetition of a single raw life story -- difficult woman as told through difficult women.

Gay recently came out with her actual memoir, Hunger, so I'm interested to read that and see how these essays fit into the picture.

Bottom line:  This isn't a book I would feel comfortable recommending to any random person, but it's also important that these often-stigmatized types of stories be heard and discussed, and that the reader is taken outside their comfort zone.