“Painfully Obvious: A Collection of Short Stories” brings together tales of ordinary people navigating the highs and lows of everyday life. First time writer RJ Farmer introduces his characters with deep emotional scars brought to life by events of both joy and sorrow. Each story peeks into moments that feel all too familiar as the drama of life, yet they hold a truth that catches us off guard—a truth that’s been there all along, right in front of us.
In Act Ugly, the narrator recalls his earliest memories as a child of young parents from a small town who have started a family in the gritty city. Behind the brief moments of being a toddler, we learn of a dark and dysfunctional undercurrent within his parents’ marriage.
The next story, Finding Father, weaves the tale of a family history that begins in the 1800s and leaps into the modern era with the quest of a grandmother desperate to reconnect her memories to the father she lost as a child.
In the story titled At SeventySeven, a lifetime of memories convene for an isolated and lonely man on his birthday, leaving him asking what it really means to grow old and to live with loss.
Stories like Dog Head Days and Better with the Broom explore the quiet drama of working-class people navigating their jobs and the relationships that form with coworkers as they try to find meaning for their path in life. These stories give the reader a snapshot of daily routines and rote tasks that hide deeper struggles and hidden desires.
Meanwhile, August in Alabama and A Year in Pig Town takes us on deeply personal journeys with the protagonists; one in the wake of his father’s sudden death and the other in a failed attempt to become an independent adult. Both stories capture the essence of place—putting the reader in small samples of life’s uncertainties that turn the tension of the unknown into a reality that shapes who we become.
RJ’s stories take quirky settings like the racetrack in the dimly lit God at the Hi-Ho Bar and the off-campus store of Puff Leather to challenge our sense of the good and bad aspects of the choices we make in life. Sometimes, it’s in these unusual places where the most blatantly human truths come to light. This is also true of Time and Life, a story that pierces classism in a fantasy scenario relatable to anyone who has toiled in a corporate job.
In El Sur Grande, RJ presents a casual adventure on the west coast that leaves a an unexpectedly violent trail for the reader with a character whose perceptiveness hides a dark and damaged soul.
Additionally, feeding the soul is a key theme of The Good News Brunch, an uplifting story about a friendly outing between an older teacher and his former student.
One of the most potent stories comes from 1222, the story of a young family in their first home. Told through the eyes of the oldest son, we witness the innocence of children at play corrupted by the casual cruelty of people unable to recognize what bonds them within a community. The story blends friendship with the unevenness of social norms that has burdened many American neighborhoods.
And finally, in the closing story, Downy Oshun, we reach a portrayal of the tension of transition in young people’s lives. At this point, we’ve traveled through the landscape of human experience as seen through the eyes of the flawed and the virtuous, the young and the old. Each story has shed light on how we face the obvious truths in our lives and the inevitable awareness that come from understanding that as things seem, so things are. The city of Baltimore, the author’s hometown, has been part of the backdrop in several of these stories, reflecting the author’s inherent interest in the basic struggles of the average working-class person’s quest to find meaning in their existence. The stories seek to show how place can shape purpose and reveals outcomes both tragic and human.
This collection invites you to sit with these stories, reflect on the moments, feel the awareness and input hope into the awful acceptance of the life these characters live. RJ asks that the journey through the stories helps you see your own life’s truths in a new way. That perhaps a recognition comes forward in your mind showing that the most profound insights are the ones that have been there all along waiting for us to notice. And in noticing them, we may come to find that they were obvious to us all along.