On the Outskirts of Normal: Forging a Family Against the Grain (review)

It is not hard to side with a narrator who manages to include dairy products in a description of a physically abusive relationship:

I gave up reasoning with him [a second husband] and walked out the door and got in my car. He stood in the driveway in a navy blue bathrobe and threw an unwrapped brick of Velveeta onto my hatchback. The cheese lodged there. Thirty miles later, I stopped at a gas station to find the ice scraper—it was summer—and scraped off the cheese as a truck driver watched, curious.

From the opening pages of her first memoir, On the Outskirts of Normal: Forging a Family Against the Grain, Debra Monroe depicts her life as jammed full of nagging puzzles that she keeps trying to solve: failed marriages, an estranged mother, an alcoholic father, enigmatic medical conditions, small-town racism. When presented as a list, each of these issues is overwhelming, but Monroe attracts us because she’s able to see some humor, albeit dry, in most of her experiences. “Virulent racism is rare,” she says when describing her occasional post-adoption encounters with obvious bigots, “but, like polio, not eradicated.”

Reviewers and booksellers have packaged the book as an adoption story. Blurbs foreground the adoption of a black baby by a white single woman. Monroe and her young daughter, Marie, sit on the book’s cover looking out on the world like opposites. We expect a memoir in the vein of Nancy McCabe’s Meeting Sophie: A Memoir of Adoption, or Robert Klose’s Adopting Alyosha: A Single Man Finds a Son in Russia, a memoir where the adoption process and the relationship between the single parent and child sit at the heart of the book. What we get instead is much bigger: a depiction of adoption and motherhood working as catalysts to help Monroe heal her past and move toward the future. As much love story as adoption narrative, On the Outskirts of Normal wows us and moves us as an originally written exploration of one woman’s struggle to grasp a well-deserved happiness.

Within these pages, even less-serious puzzles than life crises intrigue the reader. In one chapter, “The Time to Be Lovely Is Always,” Monroe devotes over 20 pages to her tenacious pursuit of the perfect hairstyle for her daughter: braids, Afro puffs, Nubian knots, twists, fake hair, pink pomade, relaxers, dorags, extensions. During the process she lives a hair nightmare, but transcends cross-cultural stereotypes while trying to incorporate conflicting advice from both white and black acquaintances and strangers, none of whom she can please, all of whom bring out her defensiveness and reinforce her identity as a 30-and 40-something woman living an unconventional life.

The stylist frowned. Her husband chimed in. They’d heard it was illegal for white people to adopt black children. I explained that most social workers think a same-race home is the best possible placement, but now it’s illegal not to place a child in the best home available at the time, regardless of race. I said, “There wasn’t a black home when she was born. She would have gone into foster care. I couldn’t have said no. I love her. I can’t imagine not being her mother. Her skin, my skin, I just don’t care.” I’d forgotten where I was. I refocused. “But I need some pointers about hair care,” I added, ever receptive.

The stylist smiled. She put softener on my daughter’s hair, and Marie cried, “Mama, Mama, it stings.”

Self-effacing and unsure, Monroe recognizes that her status as a single mother and as an academic might earmark her as a weirdo to some even without her obsession about hairstyles. The problem is compounded because she is trying to raise her daughter and deal with her past ghosts and present problems in a small Texas town where conservatism and...