Why I Love Difficult Women

Handling both chronic pain and societal expectations, one writer learns that maybe being called “difficult” isn’t such a bad thing after all.

I love difficult women.

Difficult women answer back. Difficult women make themselves heard. They don’t back down. They’re loud. They challenge the status quo. They’re not all that easily pleased. They hustle. They’re the ones who get called headstrong (ugh). In men, similar traits are called, variously: ambition, drive, discernment. Think about it. When, pray tell, was the last time you heard a man get called difficult? As Cheryl Strayed once put it, being difficult is really “another way of saying female and ‘brave enough to express the full range of one’s humanity.’ ”

My grandmother was the ultimate difficult woman. At 19 she found herself engaged to a man she barely knew but who came from a “good” family. It took a long train journey from Scotland to London, she told me, to decide this wasn’t what she wanted from her life. She threw the engagement ring into the Thames and went off to study medicine at King’s College London, one of two women in her year. During the Blitz, she stood on the roof of the hospital with a broom, ready to sweep away any incendiary bombs that fell. She became a surgeon, studying with the queen’s obstetrician. She set up a hospital for women in Abu Dhabi. She married twice more (and outlived both husbands), said exactly what she thought, and drank Chablis at 11 in the morning if she fancied it. She died at 95. She was magnificent.

My sister, the stylist and consultant Kate Foley, is a difficult woman. She knows exactly what she wants—she always has. At 20, when she decided she wanted to work in fashion, she moved to New York on her own and carved a career out of sheer force of will, instinct, and personality. She’s never had a problem with asking for what she wants or saying when she’s not happy, of not backing down—her work is predicated on being discerning, of getting the best possible finished result. Frequently I try to channel her when I feel I am not being listened to: professionally, or when sitting at the salon staring at a new haircut I loathe.

Increasingly, I know I’d like to be a difficult woman. But here’s the thing. I like pleasing people. I’ve always backed away from conflict. I don’t enjoy “making a fuss.” But as I’ve gotten older I have realized that these traits, which I’d always thought of as making life easier, might have been hindering me all along. That they can be misconstrued as docility, as submissiveness.

Once upon a time, I used to think it was purely a compliment to be called “nice.” “But you’re so nice,” someone might say: “I can’t ever imagine you getting into an argument.” Or, “I can’t ever imagine you having a dark side,” or, “I can’t imagine you writing a book with a murder in it.” I’m sure the people who said it always meant well. But actually what they were doing was putting me into a box. Because society loves its boxes. Women, in particular, are often categorized as one thing or the other. You’re a nice woman. Or you’re . . . difficult.

My personal epiphany came quite recently, when I was diagnosed with a chronic pain condition. I schlepped around the offices of several male consultants who dismissed me with, variously, off-the-shelf painkillers or suggestions that it might all be in my head and that, “It doesn’t help to worry about it.” I sat in the expensively furnished rooms of one doctor who literally checked his watch as I sat there. About six months into this ineffectual, expensive journey, I realized I had to make myself less easy to dismiss. The doctors didn’t know what was going on with me; there wasn’t an easy cure or solution: I was a problem patient. I had to become a difficult woman, one who wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I had to challenge their pat answers, to go away and do my own research and confront them with my findings—it was only then that I achieved a diagnosis and treatment plan. But my transformation didn’t stop there. I’ve started telling people when I’m not happy with something, and the reactions have been telling. They’re not always good. As a woman they’ve previously known as “nice” or “easily pleased,” I’m confounding their expectations, I’m challenging their assumptions. I’ve been told, variously, that I’m panicking, emotional, or being obstructive. And yet in the end, I have seen results. I am, ultimately, listened to. I am taken more seriously.

Think of a list of women who inspire you. Mine includes figures like Frida Kahlo, Emily Dickinson, Gloria Steinem, Oprah Winfrey, Martha Gellhorn, Maya Angelou. All of them rule-breakers, challengers of the status quo. Who’s on your list? I suspect that there will be more than a few so-called “difficult” women. This is because difficult women are inspiring. They reshape things in their own image. They do this for themselves, first and foremost, but they also change things for those to come. Difficult women are the ones who make the history books, who have the stories written about them. In the immortal words variously attributed to Marilyn Monroe, Anne Boleyn, and Eleanor Roosevelt (all fabulous examples of the type): “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”

There is a certain, peculiar pressure on a writer to create characters that are “likeable”— and this is a charge particularly levied at female characters: “I just couldn’t like her” or “She made things so hard for herself.” This pressure for women to be seen as nice, biddable, good, has seeped into our understanding of what we should be looking for in a fictional protagonist. And yet some of the most memorable literary creations are compellingly unlikeable women: Think Becky Sharp, Madame Bovary, Elizabeth Bennet, Bernadette in Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go Bernadette . . . even the beautiful, brilliant, and psychopathic Amy Dunne in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. As a writer, I want to write the stories of difficult women. From a pure entertainment-value point of view, they are the narratives with intrigue, conflict, drama, crisis—all of the interesting parts of being alive.

As Strayed puts it, difficult women are “ambitious and bold, adventurous and emotional, brainy and defiant, incorrigible and outlandish, determined and badass.” They are about pleasing themselves as much as those around them. They don’t say yes simply because it is expected of them. As a result, they might put a few backs up, but they end up getting what they really want. (As a side note: You can guarantee that difficult women have better sex.)

Really, we should be allowed to be both “nice” and “difficult.” We’re not necessarily one thing or the other—we are all made up of many different and often contradictory, conflicting parts. And it’s definitely true that the world could do with people being a bit nicer to each other. So this isn’t to bash “niceness,” per se—but it is to say don’t be nice at the expense of your sense of self-worth. Difficult women never do that—and that’s why I love them. It’s why I aspire to be one. Because being difficult is also, crucially, about loving yourself.

Lucy Foley is the author of The Hunting Party, which will be published by William Morrow in February 2019 and which she is proud to report features many difficult women.

Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day until Valentine’s Day.

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