Review: Surplus Women

Michelle Duff is a prolific and accomplished writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, an award-winning journalist who regularly writes on social issues for national and international publications (Stuff, New Zealand Geographic, the Guardian, the Melbourne Age and the Sunday Times). She is a biographer (Jacinda Ardern, Allen & Unwin, 2020), and winner of the 2023 International Institute of Modern Letters Fiction Prize. Surplus Women, a formidable collection of fifteen short stories, is her fiction debut.

Duff’s precisely crafted tales range from realist portrayals of the struggles and triumphs of women, to the lyrical and speculative, told across time and circumstance. Most are set in Aotearoa, and in the recent past. However, the collection’s title story, Surplus Women, deftly slips between Wellington 2022 and various locations across the Atlantic Ocean in 1922, pulling on a truth about the shared fate of the two protagonists:

‘Irene had been shipped over here, along with hundreds of other women of child-bearing age, to work. She was useful as a pair of hands, and as a womb.’

This is where Duff dwells throughout the collection, on the role and usefulness of women at various stages of life, from girlhood into older age, casting them into various roles: student, call girl, real estate agent, detective, journalist.

In these stories, to be a girl or a young woman is to occupy a precarious existence: be it growing up with housing insecurity (Gracie); peer pressure to lose your virginity (Easy) or facing life on the streets ($$Britney$$). When Duff draws us into the lives of adult women, things don’t tend to get any easier: whether it’s becoming a new mother (Ortbits), working as a detective when there is unseen danger at home (Torn), or trying to keep your glam-shit together as a real estate mogul too drunk at a party and desperately needing to pee (Monstera).

Violence or the threat of violence is a constant, inescapable pressure, be it at the hands of men (List Day) or society at large (Equilibrium). The same can be said of sex. Duff writes great sex, and equally of both the fulfillment and/or disaster that can follow in the pursuit of desire (Dreamsea).

My favourite story is the one about a grandma. Spook is comically humourous, playful, insightful and yet almost unbelievably convincing (you must read it). Let Duff reel you into the world of a wise granny-spy deserving of her own Bourne movie franchise as she stalks Wellington’s Parliament Precinct and nearby alleys on her mission:

‘She moves like a spider, scurrying sideways…she looks nondescript, which always makes me suspicious. You don’t get to be a craggy old spy like me by ignoring old women. That’s my recipe. Buggered if I’m falling for it.’

Another stand out for me was Equilibrium. Told through emails, chat excerpts, and meeting transcripts, Angels attempt to get work done while being audited for ‘insider threat’. The concept of ‘angels at work’ and angel activists fighting against a regime of enforced inequity for humans (read: usually women getting a raw deal) is surprising and enthralling.

Duff is a writer who knows what she’s doing. There is a journalistic quality to the writing, a weight to the stories that is satisfying to read. There is artistry, something more playful, irreverent and dreamlike in many of them too, and it’s these that had me most rapt, tales that cut off before I was ready to let go. I look forward to reading more from Duff, and if this collection is anything to go by, I expect she has a lot more to say. Reviewed by Nat Baker