"The Truth about Me," by Louise Marburg

The stories in the collection “The Truth about Me” (WTAW Press, 2017), by Louise Marburg, are a strange and fascinating mixture of odd and sometimes grim and cruel, on the one hand, and matter-of-factly ordinary, on the other. The stories have been called (by blurbers, at least) “audacious” and “sometimes shocking,” as well as “perceptive” and “compassionate.” Making allowances for blurber-talk exaggeration, I find these adjectives appropriate for this collection. The stories usually start off with pedestrian, everyday situations, and then there is always a jolt, a surprise, yet one that is told in an unsurprised tone. The characters are resolutely ordinary, yet somehow encounter, or cause, or tolerate, the non-ordinary. Some themes are grief, addiction, death, abandonment, the pragmatic compromises that spouses and lovers often make, family, and mental illness (including a story about a mass shooting, which by chance I read the day of the most recent tragic school shooting, in Parkland, Florida, this month). This is Marburg’s first book, and I look forward to reading more by her.