MONARCH: Stories is a debut collection of short stories by Emily Jon Tobias that takes you into the dark heart of American lives, mostly those of young women on the run from, and to, a lot of trouble. As the author herself explains in her introduction, she left home early and hit the road. Then, “Still fleeing at forty, I jumped my last train headed for a final wreck. I had betrayed myself over and over again. I was dying, no more than a shell, cracked.” It was time for Tobias to write her book.
While these are fictional stories, they read like a phantasmagoric memoir, a kaleidoscope of cheap motels, drugs, excessive drinking, bad sex, and above all, bad choices. We meet a morbidly obese woman whose compulsion to eat covers up a shocking secret, a teenaged junkie thumbing her nose at a well-meaning adult who wants to save her, a middle-aged woman stuck in a cycle of affairs with married men that feature an imbalanced power dynamic in her favor. A woman in an abusive relationship opts to marry a man she hates while still pining away for the girl she loved in the seventh grade. A woman returns to bury her mother and confront a sister she’s resented for years for being the favorite in the family.
And, so it goes. A significantly talented writer, Tobias is adept at weaving layers of experience and meaning into prose that showcases her background as a poet. It’s a melodic jangle of Bob Dylan’s “Tangled up in Blue” meets “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” sautéed in Hunter S. Thompson’s “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
You fall in love with the toxic losers Tobias keeps shoving in your face. The book brought to mind a dear friend’s summation of the movie “Bad Lieutenant,” in which Harvey Keitel plays “A cop who shoots cocaine into his dick and has sex with 10-year-old girls, and he’s the good guy.”
Tobias is getting some well-deserved praise for the book, including an International Book Award prize for “Fiction: Short Story” as well as an American Bookfest award for “Short Story Fiction.” She’s also notched some excellent blurbs, with Junot Diaz, author of “The Brief Wondrous Lives of Oscar Wao” calling MONARCH “Superb original and thoroughly alive with heartbreak and wonder” and Kirkus refers to as “A gutsy, grungy collection centering troubled souls…Brimming with pure Americana, not unlike the movies Wild at Heart or Thelma and Louise…”
Addiction and trauma are the constant themes of these stories. If I had to choose a single word to unify the collection, it would be “broken.” The book is full of broken people, broken homes, broken dreams, and above all, broken promises. You hear a lot of fourth steps in the book, at least I do, having spent my fair share of time in AA meetings. The book can be seen as a roundup of recover, from overeaters anonymous, to CA, NA, AA, and sex and love addicts anonymous.
Her other main throughline, despite it all, is hope. The monarch butterfly makes a few cameo appearances, representing the potential for rebirth. Each story has its tiny sliver of potential for things to get better. As Tobias may know, however, a butterfly doesn’t see its wings. It doesn’t know it’s beautiful. Even after its metamorphosis, It still thinks it’s a bug. There’s a lot of that here, and it’s definitely worth exploring.