The Folly of Loving Life Paperback – March 8, 2016

Monica Drake is a writer of such imagination, humor and meticulous craft that I eagerly ordered this collection, and she lives up to and exceeds my every expectation. Her young female protagonist, growing up on "land" within earshot of a drive through and visual range of a car dealership steps from Drake's pages set in Portland, Oregon, and fuses with my own images of our city and of youth. I will read this book again and recommend it to others.

Honestly? I don't know how she does it. These stories just slayed me...in a good way. Each one links in with the rest. Dealing with themes such as the pressures of motherhood, sprawl, class divisions, mental illness, bonding, and growing up in this weird wonderful world. It's fantastic, reading it will make you tough whilenin makes you laugh and cry. Just buy it and see.

Another delight from Monica Drake. I just love her voice -- full of dry humor and poignancy, and so specifically of her time and place. She really makes these women and their settings come alive. Somewhere in between a traditional narrative and a collection of short stories, this book was a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Good story and honest to the core.

This book will keep you hooked the characters are alive.

Very emotional and beautiful book

"This was the new Portland--a constant, throbbing sweet tooth. There were endless lines for ice cream, cake, beer and breakfast. Everybody was carbo-loading for the marathons. In the old Portland, the rainy, broke, working class city, where I migrated as soon as I left [home]? The masses had been more into heroin than doughnuts." - from 'S.T.D. Demon'If someone asked me to recommend a book that really captures the essence of Portland, Oregon--past and present--I would point them to Monica Drake's 'The Folly of Loving Life.' This collection of short stories--which really feels more like a novel interspersed with beautifully observed interludes--captures what it means to feel connected to a place, with all the inherent contradictions. This is a place you love, but one that also has been the source of darkness and pain in your life, a place you'd leave, if only you could. This is also place as the source of displacement, a city marked by urban encroachment and gentrification, the draw of the 'next best place,' the 'Portlandia' effect. Drake has seen it all, and relays these stories of her characters and her city with a keen eye and dry wit.Drake's collection is constructed around tales of two women over a period of roughly thirty years, daughters of ill-equipped parents whose youthful ideals of raising children in a rural Eden on the outskirts of Portland are quickly derailed. Vanessa, the eldest, leaves home early but ultimately gravitates back to the city after making a game effort to separate herself from her past. And the younger sister, the goth Lucia, whose arms display the fast-food fryer scars of her youth as well as a web of tattoos, grows up in the city where she lives hand-to-mouth, often dodging damaged people while trying to find a place for herself. Nessie and Lu rarely appear in the same story--with a couple of notable exceptions--but their individual stories bear their distinct voices.The sisters' tales are bookended by short 'Neighborhood Notes' chapters, a distinct touch that lends an impressionistic--even cinematic--aspect to the collection. Like prose polaroids, these short segments are little glimpses into the city, third-person observations that give color and depth to Drake's canvas. A favorite, entitled 'Used Goods,' is a beautiful rendering of a five-drawer dresser, abandoned on a street corner, where the disembodied narrator discovers it:"Watch out for splinters when you run to meet it, little lover! So many plans rush in, each thought golden as marriage: You could put your underwear in the top drawer, once you wrestle it home, dry it off. Every drawer in this dresser is entirely different from the one below, the one above. The first drawer has grooves notched to match a cousin piece of furniture long, long gone. It's a foster drawer, tucked cozy in a new home... The dresser is a place for gathering the lost and found, like a church or a block party... These are very good and used used goods, a place where all mismatched socks can feel at ease. Now this traveling dresser, moving like a hitchhiker, needy and broken, has found a new home. when you open a drawer you'll see a pen and a book of matches. You'll find an uncapped needle. You can use it. Go ahead. It's fine. How do we know it's fine to use? Because other people have." -from 'Neighborhood Notes: Used Goods'Passages like this are the hallmark of Drake's work: a voice both whip-smart and empathetic, finding the beauty and danger in a city of the discarded and damaged. People doing their best to define what it means to be home.

Monica Drake's writing is always a delight: somehow soulfull but humorous at the same time. And The Folly of Loving Life, her collection of short stories is no exception.Her novel, Clown Girl, got me hooked with its unusual but oh so relatable characters and I've enjoyed every word of her's since. Drake's signature ability to spin beautiful kick-in-the-guts stories continues in this collection. I wasn't expecting to so thoroughly enjoy the notion of the stories being loosly linked. But their being woven together from beginning to end made the book feel a little like reading a family diary as the reader follows a family through a life time of adventure and heart break. And the city of Portland itself is a reoccurring character as we see it change throughout the stories from quaint city to the crowded overpriced condo and concrete filled place it is now. The Neighborhood Notes sections that happen periodically throughout the book were a high point of the collection, making me wish I lived in Drake's imagined neighborhood so we could compare notes about the oddities we'd inevitably happened upon in the street.It's hard to pick a favorite story but "The Arboretum" was so convincingly creepy I was hearing noises in my basement for weeks afterward. So it's safe to say her writing is rather powerful and immersive.Long story short: I adored this short story collection.

Monica Drakeの新作。日本ではほとんど認知されていない彼女だけれど、Chuck Palahniukも認める作家。ユーモアとアイロニー溢れる表現で滑稽で溌剌としていてそれと同時に物哀しくて残酷な物語を綴る素晴らしい作家。今作もそんな彼女の特徴が存分に発揮されている。短編集だけれど、収録されているストーリーは全て同じ世界の話なので、長編と言えなくはないけれど、やはり短編集だということは読んでもらえればわかると思う。決して１話解決ちゃんちゃんといった分かりやすい座りのいい話ばかりではないけれど、ジワリと人の心に染み込む言葉やストーリーに背中を押されて、ともすれば退屈なストーリーもページをめくる手を止めることはない。同じ世界の話なので、後半になるに従って、物語も積み上がっていく、世界感もしっかりしてくる、話も核心らしくものに近付いていき、グッと良くなっていく。おそらく日本で翻訳版が出版されることはないだろうから、読みたければ頑張って英語で読むしかない。私も決して英語が得意な方ではないけれど、楽しみながら読み通すことができたし読んで良かったと思うくらいには良い本だと思う。ローカルネタや俗語などが頻出するので、決して一筋縄ではいかなかったけれど、この作家を応援しているひとりとして、少しでも興味を持ったなら是非読んで頂けると嬉しい。著者のTwitterアカウントにでも感想をコメントしてあげれば、きっと喜んで返信してくれると思う。