The women in Mary Miller's knockout second collection of stories, Always Happy Hour, are frequently in a bad place--usually of their own doing. Listless and conflicted but also smart and self-aware, they drift among the trailer parks, apartment complexes and suburbs of small Southern cities like Meridian, Miss., or Round Rock, Tex., looking for a way out--but not looking too hard. They've got bad boyfriends and exes they love, bad booze and dope they can't resist, bad jobs they need, bad TV they binge-watch, bad food they scarf and bad sex they crave. As the narrator of "Proper Order," one of the strongest stories, describes her life: "I keep moving... counting the number of paychecks until the paychecks run out and I have to find new paychecks, new boyfriends and friends and living arrangements."
Miller's women are captivating. Vulnerable and insecure, yet plucky when they need to be, they're the shrewd women of the New South. Ironic when appropriate, caustic when called for, they don't miss a thing. In "Dirty," for example, the narrator observes: "I look at my boyfriend--eye boogers, dried spit around his mouth--and know I'll miss him too. I'll miss the orgasms he gives me, and how he smells, and I'll be sad I didn't accidentally get pregnant while I had the chance." A former Michener Fellow, Miller (The Lost Days of California) gets inside the heads of her struggling women, and she does so with such compassion and humor that each story delivers a penetrating portrait and leaves a knowing, if often sad, smile. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.