Busting out

“I know I am strange,” admits Hannah, a character in Lee Montgomery’s “Whose World Is This?” “When I stare out my window sometimes, I see heaven, and from there I see the world wrapped in a tiny ball . . . in the corner room of a blue cabin with white shutters, and from there I see rich, luscious valleys where rivers wind around the earth like candy ribbons, their banks crumbling and sweet as chocolate layer cake.”

Like all the women in these stories, Hannah is in pain. What gets you, though, is not only the pain but also the effort to put on a good act in spite of it, the effort of putting one foot in front of the other.

No one knows this better than Misha, fired from her job in TV news for crying on the air. After a Hmong woman shoots her 5-year-old daughter and then jumps from a bridge with the girl’s body in her arms, Misha (alone and unhinged, abandoned by her husband) walks us down the long path to the view from the span.

Where is the funny bone? The one that makes you laugh until you realize you’re crying? “We laughed because now he was doing chemo, he could eat anything and not get fat,” reports a woman whose friend has a 50-50 chance of living six months. “I yelled about how unfair it was. He stared at me, dead-pan. ‘Don’t hate me because I have cancer,’ he said.”

Montgomery presses that bone so hard she risks making us mad. Misha thinks she might suffer from a syndrome she names “compassion complexica nervosa.” Her story is called “We Americans,” and like several here, it juxtaposes compassion and stern moral judgment. Funny how empathy crumples when someone breaks ranks and breaks rules.

Montgomery’s 2006 memoir, “The Things Between Us,” about her ultra-WASPy New England family, limned the area between that rock and that hard place, making peace with hypocrisy and its discontents. Most of the stories here are set in Southern California; these women have busted out. It hasn’t been easy: Most have drug problems (which can make them tricky narrators) and most are trying -- so hard -- to feel love, the right kind, whatever that means.

“Dear Mother,” writes a woman who is considering having a baby, after her mother mails her a package of artifacts, the remnants of their family life. “Many thanks for the anxiety. It fits so well alongside the remorse, which I have placed in pretty blue bottles bought by Grandmother in Europe. . . . I have placed the ambivalence in the willow vase, which is in the window facing south. John enjoys these things, too. We have been busy looking for esteem for me to wear along with those pretty kerchiefs; I think it could be stunning beside the desperation.”

Unlike the memoir, which was all cause and effect, these stories bite back in their way. Montgomery’s piercing humor gives them a raw and powerful aggression. You may not trust these women, with their drugs and their reactive emotions, but lights pop and stars explode around them. The revelations comes so thick and fast you just can’t look away.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com