Crux

The Georgia Literary Nonfiction

By: Debra Monroe

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Paperback | 15 October 2022

At a Glance

Paperback
192 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.6 x 14

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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.

Industry Reviews

A collection of essays in the biggest sense--a gathering of pieces in conversation with one another. Monroe is generous, acute, nuanced, a writer with a complicated heart.

--David Ulin "author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles"
If humanity's defining feature is consciousness, then worry is its sidekick. Debra Monroe's It Takes a Worried Woman embraces this most human activity and rides with it across worlds: worry can be 'precaution, ' generator of 'outlandish solutions.' By turns funny, exhausted, sensual, outraged, always wise. Monroe describes her life as 'like a house you'd built yourself out of odds and ends, creaking and shaking and shuddering at every unexpected gust.' I give Monroe the great compliment of wanting to sit in this house with her, endlessly.--Susanne Paola Antonetta "author of The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here"
It Takes a Worried Woman is wandering and wise, worldly and wry. Read this book wrought from wonder.--Tom?s Q. Mor?n "author or Machete and Let Me Count the Ways"
Debra Monroe sings a worried song with fierce, introspective honesty about sex and love, marriage, parenting, violence, acquaintance rape, hate crimes, the COVID pandemic, and worry itself, its value and its cost. These essays have the qualities that have made me a longtime fan of her fiction--scalpel-sharp prose that is poetic without calling undue attention to itself; vividly drawn scenes and characters; and the kind of intelligence that never loses contact with the heart and deserves to be called wisdom.--David Jauss "author of Glossolalia: New and Selected Stories"

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