Sex and violence are strongly intertwined in these short stories.
The stories vary from the all too familiar and very real, to the fantastical and far-fetched with stories of a woman who is followed by water all her life and how it seeps into everything and creates mould wherever she goes, then there is a woman who is made of glass and married to man who is made of flesh. Even in the shortest of stories (some of which are only two pages long) you know that these characters are real and they are fully formed. These women are flawed and full of airs and graces, but they’re real women. There are many kinds of women in this book and each of them with their own set of difficulties and presenting their own way of being difficult - whether it’s by rejecting a man’s advances or using a man as a means of distraction from her pain. Gay highlights all the different ways women can have their sexuality turned against them, in some cases before they were even old enough to properly understand it. This is difficult to read, but also important.
If sexual violence is a trigger for you, you might not want to read this book as it is a major theme in many of the stories.
