The Source of Trouble

This critically acclaimed debut collection features ten stories set in the plains of the Midwest and the honky-tonks of the South. This is a world where happiness is half heartache, dreams dwindle, and infidelity becomes just another way to extend the family. In “My Sister Had Seven Husbands,” Nadine is dogged by her ever-expanding brood of children, her mother’s “born-again” neuroses, her husband’s wandering eye, and her sister’s never-ending quest for a perfect husband. In “A Pious Wish,” Candy Fae Caine is caught in a succession of “Freudian half-slips,” or compulsive promiscuity, and lives her life in search of respectability, art, and love. In “Enough,” Roxanne’s friends tell her to forget about the husband who left and the boyfriend who cheats by looking for “a man who treats you good but not so good you get bored.” In “The Widower’s Psalm,” Sherm slowly understands he’ll never be a good enough husband for his wife, Linda—whose name was painted on the town water tower by her old lover, now dead—because he can’t compete with a ghost. Characters search in vain for “the one incident you can zero down to as the source of trouble, and everything bad that happens after if happens because of it.” Witty and sly, exciting and powerful, these are stories about people who “only in the drama of hindsight shove premonition into place,” and thus understand their own complicity belatedly, but never too late. Illuminated in these affecting, self-revealing stories is the measure of hope and healing that lies in every heart and coupling, no matter the trespass.

The Source of Trouble introduces the work of a new writer whose distinctive voice and storytelling prowess are those of a writer is full command of her abilities. Although she devotes most of her energy to creating the wry women whose half-funny, half-desperate voices dominate this book, Monroe’s most appealing characters are probably the ardent, put-upon men who are devoted to those women. The sympathy with which she writes about men endows these stories with a richness lacking in the work of most of the writers who take as their subject the vagaries of the human heart.

—Douglas Seibold, Chicago Tribune

 

Debra Monroe is a fierce writer. In The Source of Trouble she fills a world with men and women living in the mouth of trouble who nevertheless try to keep faith—faith being the belief in best possible outcomes. She writes dialogue as if stitching samplers for our rawest truths, at once mean and exalted. The voices in these stories are original and frank, untutored angels amazed that there is such a thing as doom. This is a feisty debut, and I read it eagerly to see if souls in Monroe’s world would live long enough to get a little tenderness for themselves.

—Ron Carlson

 

It seems as though the characters in these stories live the lyrics of country-and-western songs. They’ve all got trouble, and that usually means love trouble. They live in towns so small and so destitute of possibilities that they must either pair off hopelessly an early age or wait, dreaming for the arrival of a passing stranger. Regret seems to be all that lies in store for them. Yet the author turns her characters of limited means and even more limited prospects into a source of inspiration. She writes with a humor, pathos, and honesty to match their own.

—Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe

 

 

Strong stories full of lively characters.

—W.P. Kinsella, The Vancouver Sun

 

Terse but witty tales… Self-revealing characters who unfold their make-do philosophies of life.

—Publisher’s Weekly

 

Monroe’s voice, with its quirky leaps from the colloquial into poetry, can go the distance; the resulting joys and heartaches are moving.

—Kirkus Reviews

 

 

Debra Monroe writes with biting honesty and clarity of vision. These stories are earthy without being mundane, full of wry humor.

—Charlotte, North Carolina Observer

 

Monroe has a bright, quirky, almost telegraphic style.

—Feminist Bookstore News