This article examines embodied difficulty in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. Contemporary experimental fiction, the paper contends, transforms formal resistance into a kind of cognitive labor. Instead of considering difficulty merely as a textual property, the paper interprets it as an interaction between narrative design and the reader’s embodied processes of orientation, prediction, and sense-making. This article, which draws on some of Marco Caracciolo’s recent reflections about consciousness-enactment and virtual embodiment, distinguishes two interrelated types of difficulty. McBride’s novel creates a ruptural difficulty through broken syntax, an unstable point of view, and traumatic interruption in language; readers must piece together meaning out of bits and pieces, partially performing the Girl’s mutilated formation of self. In Ellmann’s novel, syntactic excess, domestic accumulation, ecological anxiety, and even nonhuman counter-rhythms consummate durational difficulty: readers must hold focus in a consciousness that cannot help linking one form of private life to another crisis on the planet. The comparativist work of the paper shows that in both novels, difficulty is an embodied mode of participation. Experimental form tests readers on limits to coherence, attention, and worldmaking even as reading exposes the sheer physicality and pressurization of interpretation.