Debra Monroe – författare

Winner of The Flannery O'Connor Award, this critically acclaimed debut collection features ten stories set in the plains of the Midwest and the honky-tonks of the South.Witty and sly, exciting and powerful, these are stories about people who 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.

In the lavishly acclaimed collection of short stories A Wild, Cold State, Flannery O'Connor Award - winning author Debra Monroe takes us into the lives of women striving for love and emotional fulfillment amidst a forbidding topography of glacial winds and stormY, unpredictable menThe stories in A Wild, Cold State offer a familiar and resonant portrayal of the complexities of everyday life and the fundamental human need for connection.

Maddie, a refugee from two marriages, wanders from place to place seeking new options and new connections. She eventually settles in a cozy old neighbourhood in Tucson, gets a job, and contemplates her life so far: she has a mother who's been missing for two decades, a father she rarely sees, two sisters married to the same men for fifteen years, and a circle of quirky, spiteful, and loyal friends. Just as she's trying to decide whether she's actually 'at home' in Tucson, she receives a phone call that sends her on another journey, one that takes her both physically and emotionally into the past and affords her a glimpse of a newfangled future.

Debra Monroe has always written about the source of trouble, “that one incident you zero down to and everything bad that happens afterward happens because of it.” The illusion that every problem has a clear-cut cause and discernible solution is apparently her gateway drug. It Takes a Worried Woman explores the outer limits of her faith that all past hardship could have been prevented and all future hardship might still be.Yet one person’s trouble is often a small eddy in the outflow of history, and this book becomes a meditation on the price of effort exerted against fixed circumstances. Dense with history, lyrical, at times darkly funny, these essays explore sexism, racism, hate speech, violence, Monroe’s grief about dwindling access to the natural world, and her fears as her daughter’s adult life unfolds. Whether depicting the ubiquitous pressure to marry, the search for a shape-shifting familiar old enough to be her mother, or childcare as a game of risk, Monroe takes a measured look at problems that could be solved, problems that may never be, and at all the ways that trouble is big but hope, new strategies, fresh patience, and endurance are eventually big enough.