Book review: ‘On the Outskirts of Normal'

By Gina Webb

For the AJC

"On the Outskirts of Normal: Forging a Family Against the Grain" by Debra Monroe, Southern Methodist University Press,  248 pages, $22.50.

If “On the Outskirts of Normal” were a country-rock song, Lucinda Williams would sing it.

The voice behind the song would be plaintive, vulnerable, revealing a brash, unapologetic desire for a better life. The lyrics would tell the story of a girl from South Dakota who escaped an abusive childhood to bounce all over the country looking for love, dragging her dreams from one bad marriage to another. It would be a song about yearning for the mother she barely had and lusting after bad boys she couldn’t keep.

And then there would the verse where she dumps her abusive husband, buys a little yellow house in Texas and adopts the baby she always wanted, giving her the name she’d been saving for 20 years: Marie.

With her tumbling red curls and sly smile, author Debra Monroe  even looks a little like a country singer. She has written four other books of fiction -- her collection of short stories, “The Source of Trouble,” won the Flannery O’Connor prize -- and teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University, not far from the town where she lives with her teenage daughter Marie.

Sounds pretty normal, but it wasn’t always. Monroe was the child of an alcoholic who hit and a mother who went from him to a second, even more abusive husband.

The first in her family to finish high school and go to college, Monroe was twice married and had her third miscarriage before she was 30. She earned a Ph.D. while still believing domestic abuse was unavoidable “like bad weather, like fire or earthquakes.” She dated men she met in bars and the hardware store. “I couldn’t spot the trouble,” she writes. “My weirdometer never went off.”

When she adopted Marie, she hoped the process of nurturing and protecting the child would turn her into “a good person,” a smart mother. Because Marie was African-American and their Texas town was small, there were the predictable remarks from curious but insensitive whites -- “What is she?” and “Is that a crack baby?” Monroe responded with grim tact. She doesn’t harp on the subject of race, and the first part of her life with Marie is more about being a new mother -- “I woke the baby to make sure she was breathing” -- than being the mother of a black child.

She’s got that territory covered, though. “It took 40 minutes to put her hair in pigtails that flared away from her head, fierce and dramatic as plumes on a Seminole Indian. I needed a salon, I decided.”

When a crisis hits, it has little to do with Marie’s skin color and more to do with the parenting Monroe never got. The death of her mother, a series of baffling health crises, and what begins to look like the derailing of Monroe’s life trigger fears that everything she never learned about how to protect herself from harm is coming home to roost.

Determined to shield Marie from unhappiness -- and in an effort to contain the damage in the only way she knows -- Monroe scrutinizes her history, searching for clues, patterns, “an orderly plot in my disorderly tangle of memory.”

As she sifts through the daily flood of incidents and conversations, her tone is alternately matter-of-fact, brusque and instructive, her sentences faintly rushed, as if there’s too much to get down.

Nothing is too minor to yield meaning: a conversation in the park, a stray comment made by a repairman, a dream about a dead relative. Insight into her mother’s life is especially valuable; if Monroe can crack the code on why her mother stayed with an alcoholic husband, then an abusive one, maybe it will guarantee it will never happen to her -- or Marie.

You can almost hear Lucinda singing, “I changed the lock on my front door so you can’t see me anymore.”

In this graceful, disquieting and intensely felt account of her navigation from the outskirts to normal, Monroe offers the story of how she became the mother she needed to be -- not to Marie, who in Monroe always had a fine mother, but for herself, so she could finally have and keep what she deserved.

As Lucinda would surely say, that’s not too much to ask.