This week, I continued to read from Roxanne Gay’s Difficult Women. I began by reading In the Event of My Father’s Death. When the story begins, the unnamed narrator and her father are driving up the mountain to the house of the father’s mistress. This affair of the fathers is by no means a secret. After the narrator’s mother finds an earring that is not hers, she says, “‘Tacky costume jewelry’ she said, as if the quality of the earring angered her more than their presence in her bedroom.” In this story, Roxanne Gay continues to employ those lists she loves so much. We can see that use of a list when the narrator describes her parent’s relationship: “She didn’t mind that my father was married and had a kid. She never expected much from him.
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This story is concerned with the relationship of a woman and her husband (David)- and the secondary relationships each of these characters have with their mistresses/(male gender word meaning mistress??) The story is framed by the repeated phrase, “Our relationship is like this,” and each character has “their part to play in the cliché.” Roxanne Gay is never afraid to tell us what this story will be about. In the third or so page, we get a reference to the stories’ title: “He (unnamed) worries because he reads about the hazards of smoking and is particularly concerned that smoking decreases bone density.” We learn that the narrator of this book is a writer- automatically this makes me think that this piece of fiction is perhaps mostly autobiographical. Roxanne Gay writes, “Our relationship is like this- a terrible cliché. He is that professor who has torrid but discreet affairs with research assistants and students and strangers he meets in hotel bars. He knows I know. I know he knows I know.” Here we see the repetition phrase (our relationship is like this) and Gay’s willingness to play with language on the page. Unlike many other stories involving unfaithful marriages, this female narrator is not a victim- she has affairs of her own and is entirely conscious of the type of marriage she has. This arrangement felt more refreshing to be than the typical faithful, stay-at-home
This story is concerned with the relationship of a woman and her husband (David)- and the secondary relationships each of these characters have with their mistresses/(male gender word meaning mistress??) The story is framed by the repeated phrase, “Our relationship is like this,” and each character has “their part to play in the cliché.” Roxanne Gay is never afraid to tell us what this story will be about. In the third or so page, we get a reference to the stories’ title: “He (unnamed) worries because he reads about the hazards of smoking and is particularly concerned that smoking decreases bone density.” We learn that the narrator of this book is a writer- automatically this makes me think that this piece of fiction is perhaps mostly autobiographical. Roxanne Gay writes, “Our relationship is like this- a terrible cliché. He is that professor who has torrid but discreet affairs with research assistants and students and strangers he meets in hotel bars. He knows I know. I know he knows I know.” Here we see the repetition phrase (our relationship is like this) and Gay’s willingness to play with language on the page. Unlike many other stories involving unfaithful marriages, this female narrator is not a victim- she has affairs of her own and is entirely conscious of the type of marriage she has. This arrangement felt more refreshing to be than the typical faithful, stay-at-home