This Book Will Change Your Life - Gigantic Failures by Mark Cronin.

Are we talking gigantic failures when we talk Gigantic Failures by Mark Cronin, or something else? Small failures that pile-up on one another: fucked relationships, ill spouses, overbearing parents, suicidal friends, and on and on? Ostensibly, the world of Cronin's stories is that of small town America with its chain restaurants, dead-end jobs, and plastic pools, but where these stories ultimately reside is in the quotidian fuckedness of every day life, and in that world, truly gigantic failures aren't required for everything to go to shit. They will anyway, moment to moment and day to day, with no clear way to stop the march towards the gigantic because when it's all done, when the relationships are over and the friends are dead, it all really does feel gigantic. It also seems unavoidable, and it is Cronin's great gift to write the unavoidable with a sense of respect and empathy that is otherwise lacking in the lives of his destined to be destitute characters.