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Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life
From a writer Steve Almond calls “the master of the down and out that just got worse” comes a collection of stories that live vividly in the reader’s memory long after the final page has been turned. Taking place in a world of desperate people who cling to hope, but have few expectations, Roberge introduces us to a motley crew of cripples, drug addicts, former child actors, chimpanzee boxers, exterminators, and assorted criminals. These desperate, boldly original stories are distinguished by a stark prose reminiscent of Denis Johnson or Lorrie Moore, but are, ultimately, all their own—powerful, riveting, deeply felt, and darkly funny.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
122 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 22, 2010
Rob Roberge writes of broken people, with broken dreams, living broken lives. They've got broken teeth, broken bones, and they're flat broke destitute. The only thing that isn't broken is Roberge's writing. As with his other two books, Drive, and More Than They Could Chew, his short stories and characters in Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life, are familiar in that it's like he channeled my entire social network and all my past acquaintances. Yet at the same time it was strangely unfamiliar as what I thought would happen didn't and suddenly I had to reevaluate what I was thinking and why I was making these assumptions. Was it me and my desires and fears, or was it the raw exposed nerve that Roberge is able to rub up against making all of us look at ourselves while judging others? The best example is the first story with the same title as the book, where a third of the way through it went from oddly amusing to a dark horrifying reality.
Typically Roberge disarms us with humor, and then opens the door into the bleak world his characters inhabit. His prose is brilliant, the premises and situations intense. Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life is the best short story collection I've read in a very long time.
Typically Roberge disarms us with humor, and then opens the door into the bleak world his characters inhabit. His prose is brilliant, the premises and situations intense. Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life is the best short story collection I've read in a very long time.
January 31, 2019
I discovered Rob Roberge last year after reading his memoir, Liar. I liked his writing and went in search of his fiction. I must say finding his books isn’t that easy.
I haven’t been lucky enough to find any in local used bookstores. So my purchases will be online and that is where this copy came from.
This book is a collection of short stories, most previously published elsewhere.
They deal with the darker more disturbing side of life.
And as I was reading the stories, I thought maybe that was why I read horror as a teen, for peering into the darker unknown.
But this kind of horror is so much more real. It’s what really happens!
The decisions people make, the not so easy ones from killing a rat to thinking of killing a brain damage friend. Do we dare consider these possibilities?
Maybe I’m also drawn to that darker side of life because it’s familiarity, of past experiences.
Broken people, broken families, difficult situation, drug addiction, etc.
This book is not for light entertainment. It’s not that kind of read, but if you’re interested in looking closer at a life different than your own, or at people in not so wonderful circumstances, then this book is worth the read.
I haven’t been lucky enough to find any in local used bookstores. So my purchases will be online and that is where this copy came from.
This book is a collection of short stories, most previously published elsewhere.
They deal with the darker more disturbing side of life.
And as I was reading the stories, I thought maybe that was why I read horror as a teen, for peering into the darker unknown.
But this kind of horror is so much more real. It’s what really happens!
The decisions people make, the not so easy ones from killing a rat to thinking of killing a brain damage friend. Do we dare consider these possibilities?
Maybe I’m also drawn to that darker side of life because it’s familiarity, of past experiences.
Broken people, broken families, difficult situation, drug addiction, etc.
This book is not for light entertainment. It’s not that kind of read, but if you’re interested in looking closer at a life different than your own, or at people in not so wonderful circumstances, then this book is worth the read.
May 13, 2012
The collection features men and women who’ve been through the wringer and are trying to make changes in their lives. Roberge keeps them close, so that when they fail, we can see if they do so with grace or, as is more often the case, an utter lack of dignity. There are exterminators, demolition-derby drivers and men who share cells with desperadoes with the words “I can” and “see you” tattooed on their eyelids.
Things take a grisly turn in the second half of the collection as the stories move into territory staked by Barry Gifford, who wrote the novel that David Lynch adapted for Wild at Heart and co-wrote the screenplay Lost Highway. Slick, brutal and weird, these stories remind us of the violence that lurks at the edges of our awareness. From the sketchy-looking high-desert drifter to the nightmares derived from our own past, Roberge reminds us there’s no escape from our desires, and sometimes those who don’t survive are the lucky ones.
Short, slick, brutal and weird. Roberge gives Barry Gifford a run for his money in this neo-noirish stories of life on the edge.
Things take a grisly turn in the second half of the collection as the stories move into territory staked by Barry Gifford, who wrote the novel that David Lynch adapted for Wild at Heart and co-wrote the screenplay Lost Highway. Slick, brutal and weird, these stories remind us of the violence that lurks at the edges of our awareness. From the sketchy-looking high-desert drifter to the nightmares derived from our own past, Roberge reminds us there’s no escape from our desires, and sometimes those who don’t survive are the lucky ones.
Short, slick, brutal and weird. Roberge gives Barry Gifford a run for his money in this neo-noirish stories of life on the edge.
December 21, 2011
This is a short, gut-punch of a collection of stories about down-and-outers. Fans of the short fiction of Donald Ray Pollock and Craig Davidson must read this book of stories mainly set in the southwest. Hell, fans of excellent, dark short fiction should read this book. Rob is a lean, mean stylist who doesn’t scrimp on the important details and doesn’t blink or look away from the warts on his characters; and the result is as oddly beautiful as it is disturbing. Favorite stories include “The Exterminator” (a story about a purposefully inept pest exterminator and his existential crisis while battling a rat in a bathroom); “Love and Hope and Sex and Dreams” (a man on disability, with one dead arm, trying to salvage his marriage and his life); and the awe inspiring “Burn Ward,” which is essentially a conversation between two members of a burn ward, one of whom will be leaving soon, one who won’t, that is as heartbreaking as they come.
December 10, 2014
I've seen Rob Roberge's name floating around. He would pop up with names like Danielewski, Palahniuk, and King. He'd be included in a list of finds, or maybe as that extra something to get free shipping. I didn't avoid Roberge's work or forget about him, he's always there in purchased lists or grouped with like-minded authors, themes and tones that fall under the same literary hues on the color wheel of bookdom. Because I bought Dermaphoria a few years ago, I was told then that I might also enjoy More Than They Could Chew: A Novel. I looked at Lunar Park, eventually bought it, and I enjoyed every page. By the by, Rob Roberge.He hadn't been left on my door step or passed through the doors of a bookstore with me, because there was always something immediate, something more intriguing, and when you read as slow as I do, you have to pick and choose. However, in a recent interview with Booked Podcast, Craig Clevenger remarked on a change in Roberge's writing with his latest effort. It is a change that inspired awe and left Craig wondering who broke Roberge's heart, especially since Rob is happily married. With a reaction like that, I could no longer go without taking Roberge lovingly into my read-hole. With little more than Clevenger's kind words and a long-lasting knowledge of a writer's name, I bought Working Backwards From the Worst Moment of My Life.
The book is a collection of short stories, first of all, which for whatever reason surprised me. I'm not sure why, I guess I was expecting a novel. That is how blindly I bought this book. The title inspired a hope, or maybe a belief, that this was going to be one story about some poor sap with some soul-sucking bad luck. Rather, a whole cast of characters live and breathe in these pages. Even in the shortest of stories, Roberge drives home words on a page so that they climb out and sit beside you. They smell, you can hear them scratching while you flip the page. They raid your fridge and play fetch with your dog.
The story opens with a character charged with the task to throw eggs at his mentally challenged brother like he were a carnival game, every time yolk exploded on him, he turned around and walked the other way. That story sets the tone for the rest of the book. It isn't going to be happy. There won't be a tale that doesn't get touched by the deranged acts of life, fate, or love. The tragedy that blooms here is life. All of this is real, all of this can be true, and Roberge's writing taps you on the shoulder, waves at you with one hand, and reaches inside, griping at your heart with the other. His words squeeze, the language grips, and the characters exist inside of you until you're mush between his fingers. These characters exist inside of you on the worst days of their lives, the pest exterminator, the narrator that watched his father kill someone, the home-bound injured man wondering why his wife hasn't left him yet, the ex-child star on his way to score pain pills. They walk around inside of you until you no longer know if you're one of them.
Release Date: October 1, 2010
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Official Website: HERE
March 7, 2011
These wonderful gritty stories will bring me back again--I love a good blood and dirttrack low-down world, and Roberge writes of the lives of these desperate men like an angel.
August 31, 2014
Amazing. Nothing more can be said.
July 20, 2016
Rob Roberge attacks his craft with a stunning, fearless fluidity, infusing his fiction with humor, terror, tragedy, oddity, and esoterica, often all at the same time.
October 4, 2011
No one tells a devastating story of failed fathers like Rob Roberge. “Working Backwards” deserves to be read widely and used as a blueprint for short story telling. The only problem I have with this book is that is hasn’t sold ten million copies.
Roberge turns terrible impulses that reside within all of us into jaw dropping beauty. His stories leave an echo that’s hard to shake, like the sick babies and horrible loves in Lorrie Moore’s “Birds of America.” Before I go crazy with the failure-of-fathers thread, I have to point out the gestation process of this book and how it was finally born because it’s crazy. Before Red Hen snatched up “Working Backwards,” it did laps in a literary Petri dish of close calls and false starts. It was nearly published several times, but in the financially ruinous economy was delayed and finally abandoned along with one failed publishing house. It was runner up in several contests, including “Other Voices.” After a stiff debate, it was beat by Corrina Wycoff’s novel “O Street.”
Roberge has a knack for the rhythm of grief that we inevitably dance to, whether we want to or not. In “Border Radio,” we see a father kill a man in front of his thirteen year-old son and we follow the bodies/bloodline to the kid’s grandfather who grafted goat balls to his patients as a fertility cure; A man who extracted huge amounts of money from sad men during the depression, and who was ultimately shot by one of his dying patients. That same grandfather started a radio station in Mexico and the waves carried that haunting familial music: devastated people leading horrific lives. That music is, somehow, the most comforting beautiful music I’ve heard in ages. “Border Radio” may just be my favorite short story ever written.
In “Swiss Engineering” a brother leaves our protagonist a Volvo after he dies of brain cancer at forty-two. The story is dusted with sad, beaten men, the impulses we are left with when the people we love die and, especially, the giddy, terrible rage and guilt we are left with, the “new words that hospitals and death give us,” (fugues, malignant, benign) and cars we don’t need. The protagonist enters the Volvo in a demolition derby in Destin Florida (the “Redneck Riviera”) and sees “ugly lousy people” and asks “Why not them? Who would miss them?” Our protagonist’s sad fury drives the fuck out of that Volvo and hears his own neck snap, the car, his body and his heart, crushed by the blows of loss.
Roberge turns terrible impulses that reside within all of us into jaw dropping beauty. His stories leave an echo that’s hard to shake, like the sick babies and horrible loves in Lorrie Moore’s “Birds of America.” Before I go crazy with the failure-of-fathers thread, I have to point out the gestation process of this book and how it was finally born because it’s crazy. Before Red Hen snatched up “Working Backwards,” it did laps in a literary Petri dish of close calls and false starts. It was nearly published several times, but in the financially ruinous economy was delayed and finally abandoned along with one failed publishing house. It was runner up in several contests, including “Other Voices.” After a stiff debate, it was beat by Corrina Wycoff’s novel “O Street.”
Roberge has a knack for the rhythm of grief that we inevitably dance to, whether we want to or not. In “Border Radio,” we see a father kill a man in front of his thirteen year-old son and we follow the bodies/bloodline to the kid’s grandfather who grafted goat balls to his patients as a fertility cure; A man who extracted huge amounts of money from sad men during the depression, and who was ultimately shot by one of his dying patients. That same grandfather started a radio station in Mexico and the waves carried that haunting familial music: devastated people leading horrific lives. That music is, somehow, the most comforting beautiful music I’ve heard in ages. “Border Radio” may just be my favorite short story ever written.
In “Swiss Engineering” a brother leaves our protagonist a Volvo after he dies of brain cancer at forty-two. The story is dusted with sad, beaten men, the impulses we are left with when the people we love die and, especially, the giddy, terrible rage and guilt we are left with, the “new words that hospitals and death give us,” (fugues, malignant, benign) and cars we don’t need. The protagonist enters the Volvo in a demolition derby in Destin Florida (the “Redneck Riviera”) and sees “ugly lousy people” and asks “Why not them? Who would miss them?” Our protagonist’s sad fury drives the fuck out of that Volvo and hears his own neck snap, the car, his body and his heart, crushed by the blows of loss.
December 21, 2017
I've been a fan of Rob's work since the spring of '00, when I took a class with him at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. At the end of the term, he shared three of his published stories: "Love and Hope and Sex and Dreams"; "Do Not Concern Yourself with Things Lee Nading Has Left Out"; and "Swedish Engineering." Since then, I've followed his career closely (I have a signed first-edition copy of Drive!) and he continues to amaze me.
As if I wasn't lucky enough in studying with him in a classroom setting, in the fall of '04 Rob evaluated my final project that crowned my completion of the Writers' Program adult-ed certificate at UCLA. (If you write fiction and have a chance to study with this man, do it.)
But in any case, read this book. If you're like me, you will be floored by its artistry and heart.
As if I wasn't lucky enough in studying with him in a classroom setting, in the fall of '04 Rob evaluated my final project that crowned my completion of the Writers' Program adult-ed certificate at UCLA. (If you write fiction and have a chance to study with this man, do it.)
But in any case, read this book. If you're like me, you will be floored by its artistry and heart.
March 11, 2013
Howl! One of the best collection of short stories I have ever read. Dark, dark, dark. Up there in same league as Harry Crews, Katherine Dunn. Tight writing. Loved it. My two favorite stories (hard to choose) are Beano's Deal and What Ever Happened to Billy Brody? I might give "Billy Brody" a slight edge as it is set is a dismal area of Southern California that I am quite familiar with. I shall now add all of Rob Roberge's books to my list of "to reads". I am a fan.
May 8, 2014
This was yet another book that I got all excited about discovering only to find that Patrick O'Neil was way ahead of me. And Patrick has already said a bunch of cool Patrick things in his review so I don't have much to add. I swear there are a ton of books that I could review by just saying, "What Patrick said." I really liked these stories--can't wait to read Roberge's other books.
May 30, 2011
Dark, powerful, compulsively readable.
Read
July 6, 2012Lots of dated pop culture references and exposition.
March 6, 2016
This title was my introduction to Roberge's work. Every story in this collection held my interest. I enjoyed "Working Backwards..." from cover to cover.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews