The loose woman likes men whose job titles end in the letters er. In the title story, Gay devotes herself to finding specificity in the abstraction of difficult woman archetypes. In “Best Features,” she’s a fat woman who is quietly furious at how worthless the world considers her to be. In “La Negra Blanca,” she’s a mixed-race med student who moonlights as a stripper and is constantly fetishized by men who think of her as a white girl with a black girl’s ass. In “I Will Follow You,” the difficult woman was kidnapped by a child molester when she was 10 years old.