The Usual Mistakes
These characters may be the usual suspects, making the usual mistakes, but their stories are not the usual fare. Populated by pretenders, ex-cons, and wannabes who bend the rules, break the law, and risk everything to salvage their own hearts, the twelve stories in The Usual Mistakes lead readers into a world where betrayal is just a beginning. Deception, infidelity, even death–where a person goes from there is the mainspring of Erin Flanagan’s fiction, and in the turns her characters take, we find rare insights: that we are often wedded to one another because of, not in spite of, our flaws, and that this paradoxical connection may be cause for hope.
An imposter medical assistant and an ex-neo-Nazi covered head-to-toe in swastika tattoos; a seemingly oafish but suddenly sympathetic husband and a boorish mother-in-law in need of comforting; a young boy who finds adulthood by learning to forgive: the characters in these stories are by turns inappropriate, outlandish, selfish, and kind, complicated in the ways only real people are. Though they ask for little and rarely even get that, they do astonishing things with whatever does come their way; and their stories, in Flanagan’s sure hands, never fail to surprise.
“Readers, beware. In Erin Flanagan’s smart, funny, impossible-to-put-down stories, terrible things happen to good people. Lives are upset and complicated debts incurred, but those events are just the beginning. Flanagan writes with bleak, searing humor about the survivors of collisions both physical and emotional, and her acute vision is startling, reminding readers that every loss is the beginning of a long, new story of healing and replenishing.
Erin McGraw, author of The Good Life
[Flanagan’s] yarns of Midwesterners struggling with modern life are brightened by her sharp sense of humor.
Midwestern Writers to Watch, John Mark Eberhart, Kansas City Star