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The world doesn't need to see another woman with a beautiful cry-face, a la Claire Danes or Gwyneth Paltrow, overcoming trauma and learning life lessons.
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But it's the braver choice for the book to pick a thorny character to handle this ordeal. Her tough, at times dogmatic, viewpoint is even built into the direct and unequivocal prose, which can feel stifling for its lack of nuance. Stubborn, fiery, and prone to swallowing her emotions before her kidnapping, Mireille is a difficult character for the reader to embrace. The kidnappers are horrific not only because they commit physical violence, but also because they refuse to allow Mireille to cry, to admit pain and fear. She is forced to deny her own needs over and over again. She's a warrior and a parent a mother longing to nurture but who can't afford to nurture herself. It is a fascinating and rare statement about women's complex identity that we see her aching to be a mother while refusing to cry and expose what she sees as weakness to her kidnappers. Married to the Midwestern farm-raised Michael and mother to an infant son, Mireille is leaking milk in the early days of her kidnapping and in physical pain because she cannot breastfeed her baby. Miri's body is also her strength, her mooring to her life before. An Untamed State is Mireille's story but it is also many women's stories. This is how the world's powerless often take power from women, through their most telling vulnerability: the body, by invading it, consuming it, hollowing it, destroying it. The ragtag group is led by a scarred man named the Commander, who wants to punish Miri for her good fortune. Dedicating the book to “women, the world over,” Gay unflinchingly explores the hostility directed at her privileged character. An Untamed State finds her visiting the same territory from a different, and terribly intimate, angle. She'll release Bad Feminist, a collection of essays, later this year. Gay, who has emerged in the last few years as a forceful fiction reviewer and Twitter hero of the MFA camp, has published essays on gender, identity, and pop culture for Salon and other outlets. But Sebastian Duval, a stern patriarch who grew up in the same impoverished conditions as the kidnappers, is only offering a sliver of that ransom, determined to stand his ground. Mireille, the US-born-and-raised daughter of a self-made Haitian construction magnate, was kidnapped in front of the family estate in Port-au-Prince to extract a $1 million ransom from her wealthy father. No escape from the polarized economic realities of Port-au-Prince that resulted in her situation in the first place. No sense of self as her armed kidnappers erase every boundary she tries to preserve. No air in the madly hot room Mireille Duval Jameson is forced to live in for thirteen harrowing days. There's little relief to be found in Roxane Gay's riveting debut novel, An Untamed State.