Gay references the tropes of onscreen romantic comedies and dramas and wields their narrative strategies to say something more interesting about the connections between people than the source material does. Many stories in “Difficult Women” slyly satirize elements of pop culture while also paying homage to them. This thematic tendency puts the collection into a more robust conversation with contemporary films and television shows than with most contemporary short stories. Whether Gay’s stories are about rape or about the stealing of the sun, they are also nearly always about danger and love. Rereading “North Country,” however, I marveled at how its placement next to more fanciful stories foregrounds its unabashed romanticism.
She fends off the aggressive advances of a married hydrologist and falls in love with a logger. The story revolves around a black structural engineer working through a stillbirth she suffered at the end of her prior relationship. When I first read “North Country” in Best American Short Stories 2012, I enjoyed Gay’s insightful treatment of the complicated emotions that accompany the start of a new relationship after a relationship gone wrong.
