What are you reading?

[Kätzchen]

Have any of you ever heard of Lucia Perillo?

She's a Pacific Northwest author who lives in the state of Washington and I came across a book of hers, the other night, which I plan to purchase next week - since I couldn't find a copy of it at the library.

The title of her book is: Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain (2012).

Here's a book review (LINK)

Here's a brief excerpt of her writing from chapter 1 (Bad Boy Number Seventeen):

....."I think he's funny," she says in that woofy voice of hers. "I think he's cute. I think that boy wants to be my boyfriend."

.....This is the kind of thing Louisa'll say that drives a stake into our mother's heart. Lately Mum's been talking about getting her tube tied, a plan I could condone on pragmatic grounds but against which I've nonetheless felt compelled to launch a squeak or two of protest. Louisa's been living with Mum ever since she got kicked out of the group home for repeated makeup theft, and even though Louisa's relatively sulf-sufficient - she can ride the bus, she has a job assembling calendars and pens - my mother won't rest easy until Louisa's fate is sewn up. I mean, Louisa needs a baby about as badly as she needs a scholarship to MIT, but then part of me says: What right do we have to go monkeying around with Louisa's body? (pp. 3; Perillo, 2012).

Book Description

Publication Date: May 7, 2012

A stunning debut from an award-winning poet.

Populating a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the characters in Lucia Perillo’s story collection all resist giving the world what it expects of them and are surprised when the world comes roaring back.

An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and the people who sell them door-to-door. An abandoned woman seeks consolation in tales of armed robbery told by one of her fellow suburban housewives. An accidental mother struggles to answer her daughter’s badgering about her paternity. And in three stories readers meet Louisa, a woman with Down syndrome who serves as an accomplice to her younger sister’s sexual exploits and her aging mother’s fantasies of revenge.

Together, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain is a sharp-edged, witty testament to the ambivalence of emotions, the way they pull in directions that often cancel one another out or twist their subjects into knots. In lyrical prose, Perillo draws on her training as a naturalist and a poet to map the terrain of the comic and the tragic, asking how we draw the boundaries between these two zones. What’s funny, what’s heartbreaking, and who gets to decide?