Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon to be on Fire: Essays

by Liza Monroy

Overview

Liza Monroy’s new book is collection of deeply personal essays that tackle the universal themes of romantic and familial love, fate and chance, all told in a humorous and intelligent manner that keeps the reader yearning for more. Created in the wake of Liza's popular essays– including her piece for the Modern Love column in the New York Times — Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon To Be On Fire chronicles Liza's many misadventures in her quest for love. These misadventures span a variety of countries and a variety of men, all bound together under the watchful eye of her eccentric, single mother, a profiler for the U.S. State Department, who is soon using her professional aptitude to weed out the men in her daughter’s path.

Filled with quirky details and archetypal characters from our everyday lives, with stories that are both wildly hilarious and deeply heartfelt, Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon To Be On Fire is both a vulnerably open testament to Liza's personal experiences and an intriguing work that confronts the odds of finding love and intimacy in the increasingly depersonalized world of technology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593766498
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Liza Monroy is the author of The Marriage Act: The Risk I Took to Keep My Best Friend in America...And What It Taught Us about Love and Mexican High. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Psychology Today and Poets & Writers. Her work has also been featured in various anthologies, including Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and One Big Family. Liza has taught writing at Columbia University, UCLA Extension, and UC Santa Cruz. She currently lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Table of Contents

The Profiler's Daughter 1

Two Husbands Real and Fake 17

The Fake Trip 39

Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon To Be On Fire 61

Brazilian Fight Club, a.k.a. "Foreign Exercise Class" 77

The Gold Star Breakup 87

The Profiler vs. the By-Referral-Only Tarot Reader: An Interlude 105

Somebody's French Girl: Un Essai En Quatorze Morceaux 119

Icky Sweater 139

Love and Death and Faith and Fate and Marine Iguanas 145

The Profiler Selects 157

The Skeptic and the Vision Board Party 167

The Hidden Gem Of America 177

33 185

The Manifestation of Señor Bacon 199

Stars Burned Twice As Bright 205

Crab Legs In Her Carry-On 215

Appendix A The Profiler Checklist 231

Appendix B The Special Ed Behavior Modification Expert's Manual for Getting Controlling Mothers Under Control: Techniques for Managing Your S'mother 237

Editorial Reviews

08/15/2016
Monroy (The Marriage Act) chronicles her efforts to find lasting love with the (often unsolicited) advice of her opinionated mother, a retired U.S. visa screener referred to as “The Profiler,” who she first wrote about in 2012 in an essay for the Modern Love column in the New York Times. The boyfriend “profiling” goes back as far as Monroy’s teenage years, when her mother had an undesirable suitor deported for drug use. Other unsuccessful relationships involve a Wall Street power broker and a “Robin Williams-esque” free spirit who goes to Burning Man and never comes back. The book’s title is taken from a voicemail left by an ex-boyfriend shortly before he destroys her laptop, guitar, journals, as well as other prized possessions. The most compelling essay, “Somebody’s French Girl,” is an account of a tryst with a semifamous author that provides insight into managing expectations and the layers of experience, how we can construct a vivid romantic narrative around someone when we are merely a “bit player” in their own story. Interspersed are sections titled “A Note from the Desk of the Profiler,” in which Monroy allows her mother to chime in with her side. As the stories are roughly chronological, it is interesting to watch Monroy learn her lessons, to stop romanticizing her partners or assigning them to neat boxes, to assert boundaries and rules, even if they get broken. When she finally gets her happy ending, it feels earned. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Monroy chronicles her efforts to find lasting love with the (often unsolicited) advice of her opinionated mother, a retired U.S. visa screener referred to as “The Profiler"... [she] provides insight into managing expectations and the layers of experience, how we can construct a vivid romantic narrative around someone when we are merely a “bit player” in their own story... it is interesting to watch Monroy learn her lessons, to stop romanticizing her partners or assigning them to neat boxes, to assert boundaries and rules, even if they get broken. When she finally gets her happy ending, it feels earned. —Publishers Weekly

“Thrilling, enigmatic, wow! and beautifully observed—these are just a few of the things I’ve written in the margins of these essays. Liza Monroy’s writing is as fun as it is profound, as lively as it is moving—this is a book you’ll want to tell people about.” —Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen

“Unlike some of the skinflint, unreliable, or downright psychotic male suitors who appear in her outstanding memoir, Liza Monroy is a great date – a masterful storyteller, witty, urbane, tender, and hilarious. This is a fast-paced, deftly written, unsparing, and hilarious journey through the landscape of bad love. Monroy’s imperious, charming, boyfriend-deporting Mom, AKA The Profiler, is a memoir character for the ages; she seems to have emerged, fully formed, from the pages of a Philip Roth novel.” —Dan White, author of Under the Stars and The Cactus Eaters

From the Publisher

2016-08-24
A mother’s monitoring becomes helpful but overwhelming as the author travels a rockier road than most toward domestic bliss.Though labeled a collection of essays, this book reads more like a memoir and covers some of the same ground as Monroy’s previous memoir, The Marriage Act (2014). The author proceeds chronologically and follows the narrative thread of romantic and marital misadventure, but the focus remains mostly on the relationship between Monroy and her mother. The latter, referred to throughout as the “Profiler,” has distinguished herself with the State Department for her sharp instincts in dealing with visa applications, and she uses that same intuition in judging—and almost invariably rejecting—her daughter’s suitors. “At fourteen, I felt smothered by the intensity of our single mother/only daughter relationship,” writes the author, and readers can easily understand, particularly after a teenage boyfriend with whom the daughter has shared drugs runs afoul of authorities because of “a personal mission to get rid of the bad boy who captured her daughter’s affections.” But as the daughter matures into a writer in her 20s and 30s and the mother continues to overstep, the attempts to cast this as sitcom cuteness begin to seem a little unnerving, particularly as Monroy invites her mother to contribute interludes on what was wrong with her daughter’s choices in men and why. The author does seem a little deluded in her choices—e.g., she fell deeply for a vagabond who said things like, “the real art is my life,” and “I’m a professional appreciator of moments.” This followed her marriages to a gay man, to whom she gave the gift of citizenship, and a second who turned overly controlling, followed by a cohabitant poet who was both a perpetual liar and psychopathically vindictive (inspiring the book’s title). Eventually Monroy looked for direction from a reader of tarot cards, making her mother more resentful, before finding belated stability in marriage and motherhood. An uneven collection in which the author shows that it’s time to move on from mom.

Kirkus Reviews

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