Could that explain why “A Gate at the Stairs,” Moore’s third novel, is so exhausting and, ultimately, so emotionally unsatisfying? “A Gate at the Stairs,” set in the year following 9/11, tells the story of Tassie Keltjin, a young Midwesterner who’s just left her parents’ small farm — her father grows boutique vegetables, special jewels prized among foodies and restaurateurs — to attend school in a progressive college town. She needs a job, which is how she meets Sarah, a tense career woman (she runs a chichi restaurant that happens to serve Tassie’s dad’s potatoes), who, with her often-absent husband, Edward, is about to adopt a baby. Sarah wants Tassie to participate in every step of the process, including interviewing the potential birth mothers. And so eventually, Sarah and Edward, with Tassie in tow, come home with a child: A little girl, nearly 2, whom they call Mary-Emma. Right away, Tassie becomes emotionally attached to her young charge. She’s also drawn deeply into Sarah and Edward’s lives (she finds them charismatic and mysterious), and she begins a romance, her first love affair, with a seductive Brazilian boy she meets in one of her classes.

Some of these are people with painful secrets; others are people whose secrets inflict pain on everybody else. Tassie, our perceptive, bass-playing, Suzuki-scooter-riding heroine, stands at the middle of this unholy swirl, observing, reflecting and chattering with dauntless energy.

Before long, she wore me out. Moore is one of those writers we should theoretically be grateful for, a craftsperson who never wants to bore her audience, and for the first dozen or so pages of “A Gate at the Stairs,” her patter is lively and entertaining. At first Moore’s rat-a-tat puns and witty turns of phrase, her knowing banter, give her prose a sense of forward movement. Tassie describes the turn-on of being at school: “My brain was on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. Twice a week a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of stunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James’s masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie.” A few sentences later, we learn that “In the corridors students argued over Bach, Beck, Balkanization, bacterial warfare.” In those first few pages Moore, with gleeful abandon, jumbles bits and bobs from culture and academia (a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she knows the latter world well), and it’s fun to be along for the ride. She tosses bits of trivia and minutiae around as if they were celebratory confetti. There are references to priest-children of an ancient Colombian tribe, bras with built-in padding made of oil and water, the experience of being turned away from trying to donate plasma because the potential donor had eaten cheese the night before, and the comforting-sickening feel of a cow’s udder — and that’s all before Page 19.

But by the time Tassie starts waxing poetic about that udder — “the intimate feel of her lavender-veined and hairy breasts had almost made me puke,” she writes of the family cow — her oversharing becomes less than charming. And that’s when it becomes clear that “A Gate at the Stairs” is TMI fiction, a lavish, self-conscious layering of detail for layering’s sake — that is to say, much of it exists for show, instead of for the purpose of serving the story.

In the hands of certain writers, that approach can be OK. Not every writer has to be as direct and spare as, say, Elmore Leonard; lush detail and seemingly trivial digressions can be one of the joys of fiction. But Moore’s prose ends up seeming more mechanical than free-flowing: It’s an uneasy mix of jaunty and lavish. Moore does come up with her share of well-observed details, and her humor can be effectively cutting. At one point Tassie brings Mary-Emma, who is of mixed race, to the playground, and the mother of a white child approaches her and asks to set up a play date. “Maddie doesn’t have any African-American friends, and I think it would be good for her to have one,” she says. Tassie is only momentarily stunned into silence before blurting her response: “‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the woman, ‘but Mary-Emma already has a lot of white friends.’”

Zing! That’s Moore at her best. The most effective sections of “A Gate at the Stairs” deal with that kind of hypocrisy, particularly as it thrives among well-meaning liberals, people who want to do all the right things for the world and for their children only to be thwarted by their own lack of vision (or, to put it bluntly, by their own stupidity). But Moore wants “A Gate at the Stairs” to be emotionally rich, too, which is why she throws in a few wrenching twists, one of which is wholly unbelievable (it involves a judge assigning a very light sentence for a pretty ruthless deed), another of which seems too easy and facile (and hinges on an unanswered e-mail and the guilt it engenders).

It could be that Moore is simply trying to do too much. “Birds of America” was her most acclaimed book, and it was published more than 10 years ago; her fans have been waiting for a new book for a long time. (Her previous novels were the 1986 “Anagrams” and the 1994 “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?”) No wonder she’s tried to pack so much in. When Tassie boards a plane, we get this observation about a random sign: “Contents may shift during the flight, we had been told. Would that be good or bad? And what about the discontents? Would they please shift, too?” Elsewhere, she ponders the fate of Sylvia Plath: “Oh, if only she had married Langston Hughes!” In a reflection that links Tassie’s own mother, Plath and Sarah’s impending motherhood, Moore gives us this sentence: “Motherhood like radar or radiation was radiantly in the air.”

Moore isn’t lazy. She has the exact opposite problem: This is a case of a writer’s working too hard. She doesn’t allow enough air around her sentences — there’s no space for the gags to breathe, and her brainy contemplations continue to stack up until they resemble piles of clutter. That surely isn’t Moore’s intent: Clearly, she wants to open us up to our own ability to feel. All writers are performers — it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise. But there’s so much tap-dancing, sky-diving, bungee-jumping and unicycling in “A Gate at the Stairs” that Moore’s greater goal just seems like an afterthought. Sometimes the best way to get from point A to point B is to simply walk.

As for the stories themselves, a few showed a great deal of talent,including the excellent winning story, “Farewell, Angelina,” by 17-year-old Susannah Rutherglen, which is out now in the March Seventeen. Susannah’s writing is clean and understated, her characters seem real and her details are just right. All of this was pretty obvious within the first fewparagraphs. Most of the other stories, meanwhile, were abysmally bad. Maybe that sounds mean, but I would argue that the same great-abysmal ratio applies to any batch of writing produced by people who are not, by profession, writers; that is, it had nothing to do with the fact that the writers were an average of about 15 years old. One summer during college, I was an intern at the Atlantic Monthly, and our primary responsibility was reading unsolicited fiction manuscripts. Unfortunately, the experience helped me understand why instead of featuring so-called fresh voices, magazines choose to print stories by John Updike or Joyce Carol Oates overand over again.
There was, however, one significant difference in the submissions I read for Seventeen: In the writers’ awkward phrasing or corny descriptions, you could imagine all the ways they might improve if they stuck with it. And that was precisely because they were 15 years old.

I found that most stories featured one of three plots: The narrator decides that this is the year she’s going to become popular; a cute boy moves to the narrator’s neighborhood/joins the narrator’s class/makes meaningful eye contact with the narrator at the amusement park; or early death of some sort occurs, usually by either suicide, homicide, car accident, AIDS or cancer. Adolescence in these stories is marked by a vacillation between excruciating self-awareness and complete lack thereof (“I was feeling very depressed and I had to do some major soul-searching pronto. I checked my watch. I had 42 minutes of lunch left, plenty of time”); by the looming presence of boys (“Her name is Skye and her decision involved 11 different guys. She had to decide on her escort to the homecoming dance, and it wasn’t easy”); by endless self-definition and categorization (“Shevaugn and I are the second richest teens on the block. The richest teens are Adrian and Taylor”); and by improbable coincidences:

“I don’t believe it,” Nick said, laughing.
“What?” Mackenzie asked, bewildered.
“You have a peanut butter and banana sandwich cut in half, pretzels, two Oreo cookies and a Hawaiian Punch juice box.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s exactly what I always pack.”

Another staple of the stories is elaborate descriptions of physical appearance: “She had wavy brown hair, green eyes, and a perfect smile. She was tall and slender. The perfect body. She wasn’t too big, or too small in the northern and southern part of her body. She also had a good tan.” Or: “Matt was a truly unique person. He had shiny red hair and beautiful hazel eyes.”
And clothes, apparently, are just as important as hair and body: “It was a half an hour before the party … I was going to wear my blue velvet mini-skirt with my white baby-tee, my blue vest and my hair pulled back in a little ponytail and curled. Shevaugn was wearing her purple velvet skirt that was down to her knees, her white belly blouse that tied in front, and her hair was in a low ponytail with a green fluffy elastic on it.” Of course, physical descriptions aren’t always gratuitous — sometimes they’re central to the plot: “Jason’s about five-six, and he has wavy blonde-brown hair down to his chin and big, dark, green eyes. It suddenly hits me like a ton of bricks. Omigosh! Jason’s hotter than I thought!” (I’ll end the suspense — yes, the narrator and Jason do end up together. As she reports near the story’s conclusion, “He’s teaching me to play drums and he’s learned to like Fiona Apple.”) The importance of appearance informs all the stories, even when a particular person’s looks aren’t being described.

“Is that it then? You don’t like the way he looks?”
“Well,” I had to choose my words carefully. “I just wouldn’t want to walk around a mall with him.”

This passage contains what I love most in these stories — a kind of unapologetic honesty about what matters, even if it’s not what should matter. Like Woody Allen’s heart, these narrators want what they want. And they usually go after it, regardless of what’s considered appropriate. As one narrator tells it, “The perfect, all-that-you-will-ever-need-in-a-man guy approached me to ask for my number in a club that I had no business being in at the age of 12. I immediately wrote it down and gave it to him.” This honesty also manifests itself in the titles of certain stories, which are so explicit they basically obviate the need to read any further: “Traumas in Adolescent Life,” “Penelope Learns to Deal” and (my favorite) “The Day That My Best Friend Went Psycho and Told Everyone Everything.” If in writing workshops, the show-don’t-tell approach to conveying information is something like law, the contest entries both did and didn’t follow the rules. At pivotal moments in the stories, the writers are usually a little too enthusiastic, lest you as a reader should miss the importance of it all: “Jonny, I know you love me. But I’m not the same person you fell in love with two years ago. I like sports and hanging out until one o’clock in the morning. I hang out with all kinds of people. I’m not the same person. Don’t you understand?” But in describing the daily lives of teenagers (the number of stories about adults was negligible), they hit the mark exactly in both subject and diction, and they do it seemingly unconsciously:

It wasn’t until after our next class, when he walked up to her and handed her a note, that my heart started beating a little too fast. Leah, Jackie and I all ran into the bathroom to read it. I almost flipped when Jackie read the words “does Melanie really like me? If she does, then ask her out for me.” We all looked at each other, screamed at the top of our lungs and then burst out laughing. Later that day I had my sister call Justin and tell him my answer.

Or:

It all began when my best friend, Sophie, and I were tied for first place at the gymnastics competition. She thought she had won when she scored a 9.6 on the vault, but I scored a 9.8 on my floor routine. Things have been different between us ever since.

The writing also seems unconscious when, embedded in a paragraph about something else, the narrators reveal entire philosophies about larger issues — age, say, or gender or family. A few examples:

• Mom was laughing her brains out … I turned away after a while because it started getting embarrassing. It was the kind of thing a mother shouldn’t do. It was like parents having long kisses. There are some thing you should stop doing when you get old.
• We decided that we didn’t want children because they just pose a problem in a small apartment.
• Like women, he could never stay with the same job for more than a couple months.

And what would stories by teenagers be without a little melodrama? One narrator is both vivid and succinct: “I have come to believe that I am at the armpit of despair.” Other descriptions are more elaborate: “Penelope began to cry. She couldn’t bear the pain of her twice-broken heart any longer. She ran out of the cafeteria, alone and sobbing. Her tears were so intense that she didn’t notice her friend Angie in the doorway, who was also bawling.” (Thankfully, this is Penelope of “Penelope Learns to Deal.” Whether Angie learns to deal is less clear.) The stories also demonstrate a kind of unself-aware feminism. These girls don’t hesitate to ask out the boys they’re interested in dating. And, while it may well be true that adolescence is the time that girls start suppressing their own needs in favor of fulfilling the needs of other people, quite a few of the narrators demonstrate not-very-well-concealed self-interest: “That summer we grew very close and became almost best friends. About a week before she had to leave, she suddenly decided that she wanted to stay up here and live with her father. I was thrilled at the idea, trying to keep my knowledge that she would make me extremely popular in the back of my head.” Yes, the narrators often berate themselves for being somehow inadequate — frequently, it’s in comparison to their sisters or best friends — but when they’re looking good and acting cool, they know it, and they don’t hesitate to congratulate themselves. “In my violet mohair sweater and snazzy iridescent sneakers, I felt like I was riding high,” says the heroine of one story. Another narrator feels so positive about herself that upon arrival at the school dance, she can’t even find anyone who deserves to talk to her: “We scanned the crowd. It was mainly freshmen, and, being that we were juniors, that just wouldn’t do.” Many stories were topical when it came to pop culture — El Niqo, Hanson and “Titanic” all receive mention, and one story was titled “Thank You, Leo,” though it was not, to my disappointment, a paean to Leonardo DiCaprio. Technology also makes a few appearances:

“I just asked my mom what she thought about Internet relationships and she basically said it was crazy,” Maggie said as she felt the hot and heavy tears trickle one by one down her cheeks. “Oh, Maggie, every parent says that.”

Maggie’s skeptical mother aside, there were few stories that hinged on issues that are uniquely contemporary. The overview I got of what it was like to be 15 years old in 1998 did not lead me to believe it was much different from 1990, when I was 15, or even 1970. The same conflicts still arise, the same insecurities persist, and all you can do is put your hair in a low ponytail with a green fluffy elastic and hope for the best. The larger lesson I took from these stories was (surprise, surprise) more about me than about the authors: I understood, suddenly, why people had always encouraged my own writing when I was a teenager, even when I was churning out angst-ridden dreck. It was, I realized — and I say this at the risk of sounding hopelessly gooey — because writing is a way of explaining your life to yourself, a way of making your life bearable and a way of connecting with other people. And these are all good and important things always, but they’re perhaps most important when you’re in, say, ninth grade. Given that, the issue of whether a story has any literary merit is pretty much irrelevant.

Then there’s the fact that the mere existence of these stories, no matter what their subject matter, reveals both discipline and optimism. Discipline because it can be fun to write a few paragraphs, but a whole story is almost always work (and, therefore, even when I was laughing at and not with particular lines, I always respected the writers’ efforts). Optimism because — in light of all the stories that have already been written, and of people saying, Oprah’s Book Club notwithstanding, that fiction is in general biting the dust, of thousands of other aspiring writers entering this same contest — what else but optimism can explain the apparently unwavering belief that you have a story to tell and that you deserve a wider forum for telling it? This optimism often filtered from the act of writing the stories into the stories themselves (the notable exception, of course, being all the tales of death). Boyfriends were obtained or, at least, lessons were learned about how boyfriends being obtained isn’t the most important thing after all. In all their wistful absurdity, such conclusions genuinely touched me. It would take someone more jaded than I am not to root for these characters and for the writers who invented them, girls who live in a world that is precarious but still filled with possibilities. Nothing is ever certain, of course, but as one narrator explains in what seemed to me a cleverly modern version of a very old clichi, “We hope to live happily ever after.”

To read “Birds of America” is to plug yourself into that kind of electric current. Moore’s crackling wit and exacting eye make her America’s sexiest writer; she seems incapable of putting a dull sentence to paper. What makes her one of America’s most important writers, however, is the way her comedy bubbles up — the way it does so often in life — through discomfort, tragedy, awkwardness and loss.

Moore’s gifts were apparent from her first story collection, “Self-Help” (1985), a book she wrote while enrolled in the Cornell M.F.A. program. She has since published two novels, “Anagrams” (1986) and “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital” (1994), plus another story collection, “Like Life” (1990). Since 1984 she has taught creative writing at the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison — she is now a full professor of English — where she lives with her husband, Mark, a lawyer, and their 4-year-old son, Benjamin.

Moore, 41, has long been disinclined to talk about her private life (“I’m just a very boring, not very funny person,” she says, lying). But at least one story in “Birds of America,” “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” hints at an ordeal her family recently endured. First published in the New Yorker, the story is about a young boy who’s been diagnosed with kidney cancer. Moore acknowledges a slight autobiographical element in the story but says she was not writing a memoir. “It was fiction … Things did not happen exactly that way; I re-imagined everything. And that’s what fiction does. Fiction can come from real-life events and still be fiction.”

Moore spoke with Salon about that story and many other subjects — the perils of academic satire, the difficulties of writing while child rearing, why she’s fearing her upcoming trip to the U.K. — in the New York offices of Knopf, her publisher.

How did all the bird imagery fly into these stories — was it planned, or did you just realize at some point that the images had collected?

It’s the latter. It was something I noticed as I was completing the last two stories. And then when I went back and read all the way through, every single story had the word bird in it, for some reason. Sometimes it’s actual birds, sometimes metaphorical birds. I was a little worried about birds as in the British slang “birds.” But it’s there for the taking, I guess.

That never occurred to me — the British usage.

Birds as women. I guess it’s on my mind because I have to go to England in two weeks. And that’s what they think in England, that this is Women of America. “Birds of America.” When I was finishing up [the story] “What You Want To Do Fine,” especially when they go to the Audubon Museum and there’s a mention of how Audubon killed his birds and propped them up in his study and painted them, at that point I was thinking I might consider calling the whole book “Birds of America.” Not thinking of the Mary McCarthy novel [which is also titled "Birds of America"] at all. But thinking of the Audubon book, which is “Birds of North America.” I took the north out; it just rhythmically wasn’t right. But it’s meant to refer to the Audubon book.

What are the rules, or the etiquette, on publishing a book with the same title as an earlier book?

Titles aren’t copyrightable. My joke answer, when people ask me about this title, is: “Well, it was either ‘Birds of America’ or ‘The Group.’” Because some people have made too much of the Mary McCarthy thing.

I haven’t read her “Birds of America” — what is that book?

It’s out of print. You know, frankly, I haven’t read it either. It’s not one of her most famous books; apparently it’s not even one of her best. And so I went ahead and named the book despite the fact that there was another work of fiction with the title. There are lots of books that have the same titles. I think? Right? Aren’t there are a lot of “Lives of the Saints”? And aren’t there a couple of “Continental Drifts”? My very first book of stories also had the same title as a famous 19th-century book, “Self Help.” Samuel Smiles. That doesn’t really qualify as a pattern, but obviously titles are there to refer to each other.

You’re a professor of English who likes to poke fun at academia. In this collection a character describes academic publishing as “a big Circle Jerk”; another deplores the use of the word “text”; another calls theory “the vocabulary of arson.” Does this land you in hot water with your colleagues?

Besides the hate mail and the low salary? No, everything’s fine. Academics, of course, are the first to satirize academia.

All of them?

Well, a lot of them are, I think. Academic life, I suppose, is already in a condition of satire, pre-satire, or something. Most people in English departments read Alison Lurie and David Lodge, and they love that kind of academic novel that’s done lightly and sharply. And so I haven’t been nervous about that until just now. You’ve made me nervous. [Laughs] But who knows? There’s another issue about writers among any group of people. People get nervous. “Ooh, there’s a writer.” It’s like having a photographer in the group or something. You just don’t know what they’re taking in, what’s going to happen, how it’s going to show up.

In a similar vein, there’s a story in “Birds of America” that satirizes Wisconsin’s aging lefties. That group must see you as a spy, too.

Who knows? That story is called “Community Life,” and it has a character in it who couldn’t ever, in a literal way, exist. Someone who was a radical bomber who is suddenly running a campaign, a platform for which includes tort reform. But you know, the work of a writer is never sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce; one will offend. I offended people, I just learned, at the local hospital with the story “People Like That Are the Only People Here.” I got mail from other hospitals praising the same story from doctors and nurses and patient advocacy groups. But the local hospital apparently felt quite accused.

What made them feel that way?

I don’t know. This came to me sort of secondhand. My feeling is just that nobody likes to feel as if they’re being criticized. Obviously in fiction, the idea is not to refer to the world but to take from the world. You use it to make this other thing that incorporates and embodies the world. But it’s not meant like journalism is meant, to refer to something out there and to direct your attention to something out there. Nonetheless, obviously, people read more journalism than fiction, so when they read fiction they feel it might be doing the same thing that journalism is doing, like “look at over here, at us or at them.” So it makes people nervous. What can you do? Every fiction writer knows this feeling and has had some experience with it.

Well, maybe more so with that story, which seemed to straddle the line between fiction and nonfiction.

No, it didn’t straddle a line. It was fiction. It is autobiographical, but it’s not straddling a line. Things did not happen exactly that way; I re-imagined everything. And that’s what fiction does. Fiction can come from real-life events and still be fiction. It can still have that connection, that germ. It came from something that happened to you. That doesn’t mean it’s straddling a line between nonfiction and fiction. And the whole narrative strategy is obviously fictional. It’s not a nonfiction narrative strategy.

I think I got the impression that the story — which is about a writer not unlike yourself whose young son has cancer — was autobiographical from the New Yorker. When they ran it, didn’t they more or less bill it as nonfiction?

No, it was always a story. The way the New Yorker originally published it, they may not have emphasized that. They may have been trying to emphasize the autobiographical element there. The story itself talks about that; in the course of its narrative it talks about itself as an autobiographical piece, so I didn’t feel that it needed all that other apparatus of the layout.

Did it surprise you, the way the New Yorker played it?

I was in an airport when I first saw it. I picked it up off the stand and looked at it, and I put it back on the stand and then dashed for my plane. But you know, those are the hazards of publishing short stories, that things get published in ways that you might not have done yourself. But you have to trust magazines and you have to try to expect that it’s not going to be perfect. Frankly, I don’t think a commercial magazine other than the New Yorker would have published it at all.

There’s a moment in that story where the husband says to his wife, the writer, something like, “Isn’t this just like something out of your fiction?” Did you ever feel that way during this experience with your child?

Oh, no. The life event that gave birth to this story, I did not recognize anywhere from anything. I had no equipment or familiarity, mental or psychological equipment or experience with this. So it felt completely unfamiliar in every way. The character in that story is a teacher and a writer because I was interested in the absurdities that would be particular to someone who was a writer and a teacher. I made the character a writer and a teacher because some of the things I was interested in including in the story could only have been experienced by someone who was a writer and a teacher.

I assume the character spoke for you a bit when she said that she hates “the whole memoir thing”?

I just had her say that. That’s not true to how I feel. If you want to talk about memoirs, I have some opinions. But hatred is not one of them. I had her say that as part of a conversation.

But no one should hold their breath for a memoir from you anytime soon?

Oh, no. Oh, no. No.

We were talking a moment ago about your satire of academia and I was wondering if you ever went through a theory-head stage.

Well, you know, I’m familiar with it. I never got really completely immersed. I was at Cornell where Jonathan Culler is, and where Derrida was a visiting professor for a bit, and so it was really very much, you know, in the corridors and in the conversation at Cornell. And as writers we couldn’t stay away from it because the writing program was so tiny that we were part of this English department. It wasn’t like Iowa where all you know is writers. We hung out with all the other graduate students who were clearly immersed in theory. I did take a couple of courses and read the books and I did find it interesting initially. Although the complete removal of the author from every single text was always a little alarming to me. You know, going back home and trying to write your own. On the other hand I thought it was a useful way of talking about work too, sometimes. And sometimes I thought it was a wasteful and ridiculous way depending upon which theory and which critic you’re talking about. And I think my first novel, “Anagrams,” has a little bit of that sort of jokingly running through it. The idea of shifting realities and parallel narratives and all of that. It’s a kind of cubist structure, but perhaps it owes something to a little bit of exposure to that at Cornell. But in general, I, like most writers, am not that interested in it.

Are there Lorrie Moore theorists out there? Do you come across academic writing about your work?

People don’t, by and large, send it to me. If they’re doing it I don’t know. I have received a couple of things which alarmed me a little. I’ve become such a lowbrow now that I just go through this criticism and say, “Well, did they like the book or not? I can’t tell.”

What about criticism in general — do you read your reviews?

I do. I guess I would be lying to say I never read them. There is at some point a moment where you’ve read enough. But I read whatever comes my way, by and large. Or else my husband reads it out loud, and I’ve got my hands over my ears or something. At some point my eyes glaze over.

Does it bother you when the occasional critic says, “Lorrie Moore’s too funny for her own good”?

I don’t know, there is that prejudice against humor as somehow mucking up the seriousness of your endeavor. I don’t really quite get that. I don’t think it’s a very sympathetic opinion. But whatever, everybody’s entitled to it. I do feel that when you look out into the world, the world is funny. And people are funny. And that people always try to make each other laugh. I’ve never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn’t say something funny. If you’re going to ignore that, what are you doing? You’re just saying that part of the world, and that part of human nature, and that particular texture and vein that runs through human discourse, doesn’t exist. And of course it exists.

Do you think humor is underrated as a literary virtue?

Oh, I don’t know. It’s certainly undervalued, obviously, by the people you’ve [just mentioned]. Do I think it’s undervalued by readers? Not really. People are so eager for it.

Is it a burden writing such funny work, in the sense that people expect you to be witty 24 hours a day?

Or I have to be depressed. You know, I’m just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don’t feel pressured to be otherwise.

Are you as quick with smart comebacks as your characters often are — unlike most of us, who think of the perfect retort a week later?

Most of the responses you’re referring to, though, are not these sort of elegant, clever quips. Most of them come out of some sense of estrangement and awkwardness.

I would agree, but they’re still very apt.

But it’s not the thing that you would say if you could do it over again, I don’t think. I think those remarks usually embody the awkwardness and discomfort of the situation and the character instead of smoothing it over and rescuing the character — it actually kind of buries them further, I think. So, I don’t think these are really things that you would say in a perfect world.
Is it hard to be funny on the page? Is it something you labor over?

The humor is more the texture of the situation and the texture of the conversation. Which is not to say it’s not deeply tied to the heart of the story. Because it is. But the things that are harder to do are the sadder things. It’s harder to get that. Everything’s hard. But I am a sucker for silliness sometimes. And when someone says something silly to me, I find it wildly funny. So I’m often given to having my characters say completely silly things and I think this is wonderful. So I have to be careful, because silliness is another thing you have to worry about — a little goes a long way.
That humor, that silliness, is certainly tied to the darker elements in the stories. There’s that line in one of the stories about “flipping death the bird.” Is humor one of the ways the characters in the stories deal with difficult situations?

That is a classic theme in fiction — that humor is used to sort of fend off the nightmarish facts. And, of course, that’s true. That is at the center of almost all those stories. People being funny with each other is also a kind of generosity between people. And I’m interested in that, those little moments of generosity, where someone really does want to make someone laugh. Of course laugh, vis-à-vis this horrible stuff that is out there in the world that we all have to deal with. But those moments where we help each other out are interesting to me. And they’re theatrical. And some of them are possessed of great silliness, but they are connected to an impulse that is interesting to me. So, it’s also not just the awkwardness that creates the humor, but sometimes it’s generosity.

Speaking of awkwardness, two things that are almost always somewhat hellish in these stories are car trips and holidays. There’s a lot of both. What is it about them that resonates for you?

Well, it’s the obvious — people are thrown together in close proximity when in fact they don’t ordinarily live their lives that way. And so you throw these people together and all the extremes of their character really start to emerge. And in a short period of time. Because the proximity, or the propinquity, is too intense. And everybody knows that feeling of going home for the holidays, the family’s all together and these old grievances emerge so fast. Usually it’s the second day, but sometimes it’s the first.

When you start out writing about these car trips and holidays, do you know that these are going to be short stories instead of novels?

Yeah, all of these stories began as short stories. A novel’s a different project entirely. Each of these began as a short story. I wasn’t always sure how long the story would be — some of them turned out to be longer or shorter than I originally would have guessed. But they all were definitely short stories from the beginning.

I read somewhere that you’re maybe working on a novel now?

I am. “Maybe’s” the key word there. I’m trying. I’m taking notes mostly and I’ve done a couple of pages. It’s really at the beginning.

Do you have a preference? Do you find that one comes more naturally than the other? Do you try to alternate?

There has, in fact, been a kind of de facto alternation between the two that was not by design. That’s just the natural way things came. I would, of course, say that I am primarily a short story writer — I have more experience with short stories. I’ve written so many more of them than I have written novels. But I will also add, now is not the time for me to say I’m not a novelist since I’m working on a novel. So I don’t want to lose faith now. I would like to see myself as both.

Some observers have called you a “natural” short story writer, as if that was somehow your truer calling. Does that ever bother you?

No. Maybe I should be bothered. I try not to get bothered by anything that’s said like that. People have said it right to my face about my two novels, “Oh, those are novels?” And that doesn’t even bother me. So I must have a thick skin about that. My first novel, obviously, was a short novel with some stories attached to it. I was experimenting with form, which invited a lot of criticism. And then my second novel, which I had intended to be 2,000 pages long, turned out to be only 147, much to my surprise. So it would be natural for someone to say, “Oh, the short story is her natural form.” But I’m working on a novel now.

You grew up in Glens Falls, New York. Was your family bookish?

Yes. They were readers. My father was the child of academics and was probably destined to become an academic himself but vetoed that idea. Bailed, dropped out of graduate school and just went to work for an insurance company. But the house was full of books and music and all of that. And my mother has always been a reader. Both of them have been — they read nonfiction more than fiction. They weren’t ever big fiction readers, and they also didn’t read trash. They never were reading thrillers and romances; they were always serious readers, but they tended to read nonfiction, as I think most readers in the world do.

Were they encouraging about your writing?

They were admirably neutral. Which, when you have a child who says, “You know, I’m writing some short stories and I want to go to graduate school to continue this habit of writing short stories,” you have to be a little worried, I suppose. They were neither particularly encouraging, because it’s a worrisome decision, but they were never discouraging. They were just witnesses. And in many ways, after I got started, they were very pleased for me and were nice about it.

What did winning that Seventeen magazine contest mean to you?

Well, I don’t know. I got 500 dollars — I just thought I was rich. I thought I’d never get a rejection ever in my life. It was the first time I’d ever sent anything out.

They didn’t care that you were 19 and not 17 at the time?

No, you can be actually 21, I guess — even 21-year-olds have won this. And then I proceeded to send Seventeen magazine everything I ever wrote. They couldn’t get rid of me. I was like a stalker. I sent them everything, and of course they didn’t want anything more from me. I accumulated some rejections, then I got to some normal place where I thought I should think of something else to do for a living. So there was a big high and then kind of an adjustment — a “correction,” as stock market people say.

I know you lived briefly in Manhattan. Do you ever think of packing up and moving back?

No, not really. But I dream about it. I think about it as a kind of fantasy all the time.

Has having had a child made it more difficult to find time to write?

Oh yes.

How do you manage now?

I don’t know — it’s a struggle, it’s a daily struggle. I haven’t figured it out completely yet. Just when you think you have it, your child becomes a completely different sort of person and needs different things. So it’s hard. Initially, when I had a baby, and he took naps, I was pretty good at seizing that hour or two that he was napping, but now things have gotten kind of … I don’t know. So we’ll see. You have to be very careful with your time, you have to not waste it. I can’t tolerate now going to a movie that’s bad. This is two hours of babysitting time, and I’m watching a bad movie? I get too upset. Whereas I used to go to anything, I didn’t care. A bad movie, who cared? But now, I’m just tense about things, about time. There is also the issue where, when you have a child, this is the biggest love of your life. Perhaps when you were a writer and not a mother, just a writer, writing was the biggest love of your life. So now you have someone who’s competing for your emotional center … and winning. Do you have children?
I do, a 1-year-old.

So you know this.

Yeah, not as many movies, not as much reading …

But meanwhile, you’re madly in love. Exhausted, but madly in love, the way being madly in love exhausts you. It does. Two lovers in a romance stay up all night and don’t get any sleep, too. It’s the same idea, having a baby.

It seems like music has always played a large role in your fiction. Your characters are very in touch with that. How important is that to you personally?

I’m surrounded by music, I always was when I was growing up and continue to be. And I love music. And when I imagine a fictional world, I imagine there’s music in it for those people too.

Does it play a role in your writing?

I never play music when I’m writing — it would be too distracting. I’m too interested in music to have it be playing while I’m writing. On the other hand, there are always effects and emotions and internal states of ecstasy that you feel with music that in some way you’re hoping to re-create in prose. So music is an inspiration and an idea.

Do you keep current with music?

Unfortunately, I don’t. But I have students who keep me informed and tell me about all these various rock bands I’ve never heard of. But you know, Madison right now is home to the band Garbage …

They’re from Madison?

See, yeah.

I thought they were British.

No, Shirley, is that her name, Shirley Manson? She’s Scottish, but she lives in Madison now and all the other people in the band are native Madisonians. That’s as cool as I get.

There’s a question that one of the characters gets asked in “Birds of America”: If there was a gun to your head, what song would you sing?

If there was a gun to my head? I wouldn’t be able to sing at all.