Surplus Women
by Michelle Duff

With an award-winning career in journalism and a biography of Jacinda Ardern to her name, Michelle Duff had already proven her skill as a writer. Now, with her fiction debut, Surplus Women – a collection of short stories – she introduces herself as a remarkable new voice in Aotearoa New Zealand literature.

True to its title, the collection revolves around women: women of varied ages and backgrounds, and from different moments in time. The stories shift in tone – from satirical to outlandish to starkly realist – but throughout, Duff’s wit, nuance, and keen eye for detail results in fiction as entertaining as it is insightful.

The first story, ‘Easy’, transported me – an elder millennial – back to high school in the 90s with frightening clarity. Thumb holes poked through jersey cuffs, skirts rolled up near the undie line, exhaling impulse fumes en route to the BP for a V, discussing ‘whether Courtney killed Kurt’. Cruel phone calls, sneaking out at night, brushing arm hairs with a boy during English.

The voice (Sup? Nah.) and the 90s nostalgia (joint notebooks, curling phone cords around fingers, Juicy Fruit) immediately entertain. And yet, this first story moves with pace towards the darker experiences common to many teen girls in high school. Enduring abuse in silence due to the desperate need to belong. The slippery slope towards violation. The pain and confusion of things unsaid or hardly understood. ‘Easy’ sets the stage for what we are to expect from Surplus Women. It amuses and engages, while not shying away from the complex and troubling.

‘Monstera’ and ‘Dreamsea’ explore pain, self-preservation, and meaning in the wake of tumultuous, imbalanced or abusive domestic relationships. ‘Five times Roxanne has lied about her vagina: A non-comprehensive list’ navigates taboos and inequities around women’s health and sexuality, often through use of cutting humour and always in vivid detail.

Fifteen-year-old Roxanne, for example, ponders her make-out session with Jerome Groober (an overconfident classical guitarist with long fingernails and ‘a semi-permanent sneer’) and why she found it so difficult to ask him to stop jabbing her vagina with his ‘taloned claw’. She similarly wonders why she cannot mention debilitating, burning thrush as the reason she missed her netball match, and in later years muses over how well she fakes orgasms – like ‘something of a game. Ten out of ten, Roxanne!’

Numerous stories touch on cultural hot topics – #MeToo, political extremism. ‘Collateral’, for example, is a tongue-in-cheek futuristic story about a male musician administered with a ‘sinking feeling’ as punishment for his ‘he said, she said’ sexual assault allegation from some years prior. (‘What about everything he’d done for gender equality; the Predator Reform celebrity gala, the Men Cause Violence event?’) After he runs a PR campaign to downplay the allegations, the ‘new regime’ chooses him as one of the first men to be administered a ‘sinking feeling’ via a bracelet attached to his nervous system that could ‘come on quite strong at times’, and maybe even interrupt his sleep.

In ‘Spook’, two ex-Commonwealth gymnastics rivals turned spies intercept an attempted bombing of parliament by the Truthers – a terrorist organisation who believe the government are ‘blood-sucking snake people who must be stopped at any cost’. Better described in our point-of-view character’s voice as operating ‘like worms in the rain. Kill one, and more pop up to take their place. Cut one in half, and it multiplies, or at least, the half that can still talk tells all its mates’.

Meanwhile, the narrator’s daughter is contemplating giving up work to homeschool her children with her naturopath friend, and is ‘parroting Truther adjacent ideology’ about ‘tuning into Mother Nature’ and using adrenal hormones to predict her children’s potential for gluten allergy. The story contrasts a seemingly unassuming elderly woman (when undercover—she is, in reality, a lethal killer) with an ideology that starts with ‘just eating healthy’ and leads to the attempted bombing of Parliament. What might seem harmless, the story suggests, is not necessarily so. Not unlike Duff’s writing: a playful package that can punch.

Many of the stories are strictly realist and these often deliver the greatest emotional impact. Such stories feel informed by Duff’s background in journalism – her keen skills in observation, and understanding of the many dimensions of social issues. In two stories interconnected by common characters, ‘$$Britney$$’ and ‘Torn’, Duff explores the complexities of sex work. Teen girls revelling in money earned and absorbing catcalls like ‘Mario powering up on mushrooms’ are later apprehended by police, and we learn of the abusive men who duped them into sex work and ruminate on the ‘repackaging of exploitation to make it seem like agency’.

In ‘Orbits’ we follow a young expecting couple as they navigate a miscarriage scare and an emergency caesarean-section. Whetū – who we first met in ‘$$Britney$$’ – is a meat-worker, rugby player, avid reader, and neat-freak with a notorious surname. Sia – who avoids eggs, smoking, and drinking, and keeps track of ‘what size fruit matches their baby’s growth’ – has a so-called ‘total skank’ for a mum and a brother who is ‘on the P, like hardout’. The vague horror of childbirth is brought to life in stark detail. The hospital scenes are a flurry of poking, hooking, unzipping, humming, beeping, and fainting bouts, alongside condescension from health professionals and some casual racism to boot. Yet this harsh realism is intermittently softened by Duff’s use of gentle imagery: the baby who sleeps with ‘one arm flung above his head, like a samba dancer’, or stares up at his dad with ‘a look old and wise as the sun’. A baby who becomes the parents’ preference over parties, and aids in Whetū’s self-forgiveness for his involvement in a friend’s hospitalisation. The story hints at new beginnings, cycles, continuity yet renewal.

One of the harder-hitting stories, ‘Gracie’, is told from the perspective of a child left home alone with her sister while their mother works night shifts to make ends meet. After the children are left stranded during a school day, hiding under the bed while the motel manager wanders in to rifle through drawers, Gracie seeks help for her mother – but in a case of tragic irony, her attempt tears the family apart. The story explores the challenges and ambiguities surrounding state intervention in childcare in a manner both gentle and uncompromising.

While the collection varies widely in scope (one epistolary piece, for example, unfolds through emails and messages exchanged among a group of angels) it is anchored by the title work itself. ‘Surplus Women’ is a microcosm of the whole. It is a story where multiple stories connect through those of two very different women, separated by a century, whose broader struggles share commonalities. Both women are, in their own ways, surplus.

Zara is a working mum from 2019, with ‘milky dribble on the lapel of her jacket’. She gave up her higher paid job in order to work while doing ‘everything else’ around the home, and must ask her husband’s permission if she needs him to ‘babysit’ their kids. Her job as an archival researcher leads her to discover Irene, a young woman who immigrated in 1922 as a ‘labourer and womb’, dubbed a ‘surplus woman’ following the ‘unfortunate overhang’ after the Great War. Women otherwise ‘fated to live husbandless, childless, unsatisfied lives’. But ultimately, Irene was a societal failure. She did not become a domestic servant, a wife, or a mother. Instead, she chose to live as an artist, a free spirit, and a friend.

The notion of the woman as ‘surplus’ subtly resurfaces from story to story, character to character through varied manifestations. It links the collection thematically, and is invoked again in the acknowledgements, where Duff dedicates the book ‘to all the surplus women’. To ‘us’. It is compulsively readable: sharp, funny, harrowing at times, and no holds barred.