Salon.com > Lorrie Moore

People like Lorrie Moore are the only people here

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:32:00 +0000

Lorrie Moore is that rare bird of America, a fiction writer who has found success writing short stories as opposed to novels: Her acclaimed 1998 "Birds of America" became a bestseller, one of just a few short-story collections in the past dozen years or so to resonate with consumers as well as with book critics. (Jhumpa Lahiri's 2008 "Unaccustomed Earth" is one of the other rare examples.) The short-story form seems to suit Moore, maybe because her aggressive cleverness as a stylist is less dense, and less forced, when it's diced into smallish bits. It could be that Moore's digressions and miniaturized observations are more amusing -- and her dramatic punch lines more moving -- when they're rendered in the shorter form.

Winging it

Fri, 17 Nov 2000 20:00:00 +0000

I've lost count of the number of people who have said to me, "Can you name five terrific books that have the word 'bird' in their titles?" I think it's one person, or maybe even less than that. The number of people who have asked me is not important, really. What is important is the word "bird." Well, maybe not important, but fun to say out loud -- go on, try it: "bird" -- and also contained in the titles of the following five books, all of which are terrific.

The Birds by Daphne du Maurier
Let's begin with the book where the birds in the title are attacking you. Actually a longish short story included in different collections of varying quality (several of which are titled "The Birds"), du Maurier's tense and cerebral tale packs a surprisingly powerful punch. A nuclear family, led by the sort of sturdy, succinct hero required by law to be in all British fiction of the 1950s, is at first curious, then annoyed, then frantic and then something worse than frantic as the ornithological fauna peck and squawk and blow the house down. Like Hitchcock's adaptation, the cheesy sci-fi premise slowly fades into something truly eerie.

Traumas in adolescent life

Wed, 17 Feb 1999 20:00:00 +0000

| Like everyone else, I have no idea what women want (and I, despite my name, actually am a woman). But I do know what adolescent girls care about. How? Last spring, I served as one of five judges in Seventeen magazine's annual fiction contest, an institution whose former winners include Sylvia Plath, Lorrie Moore and the dread Joyce Maynard. Among the 400-plus pieces I read, I ended up picking both the first- and third-place winners. I also ended up being highly entertained and unexpectedly charmed by all the stories that the teenage writers chose to tell.
I'll be honest: I didn't enter into being a judge anticipating that I'd learn much. For one thing, at the age of 23, I am myself not that far removed from adolescence. And for another, I had won this same contest six years earlier. When I won, in 1992, it was the summer before my senior year in high school, and the judge who selected me as the winner (I submitted eight stories -- you know, just to be safe) was Jennifer Egan, who went on to write the novel "The Invisible Circus" and the story collection "Emerald City." In the years since then, I have had both fiction and nonfiction in Seventeen several times, and I've been receiving what seems to be a lifetime subscription to the magazine -- its appearance first in my college dorms and now in my apartment is a source of both confusion and amusement to visitors. They're even more surprised when I tell them that I actually read it.
This is all just to say that before serving as a judge, I already believed I had more than a passing familiarity with the world of girls. But there was something about hearing (or reading) so many of their voices -- in the aggregate, unedited, as they chose to present themselves instead of as someone else, like Time magazine or the WB, chose to present them -- that was both surprising and endearing. The stories came from nearly every state in the country -- Arvada, Colo., and Niceville, Fla., and Ypsilanti, Miss. -- as well as India, France and the Philippines. Their authors were named Brandi and Aimee, LaKeisha and Prudence, Willow, Meredith, Denise, Desiree, Abby and Melissa. Often, the handwriting in the notes that accompanied stories was big and bubbly. "I spilled my guts out for you and I hope you enjoy it," wrote one girl. Another signed her letter "your eternal reader" (addressed, obviously, to Seventeen and not to me). Several authors included class pictures, which I simultaneously had no idea what to do with and felt unable to throw away.

Moore's Better Blues

Tue, 27 Oct 1998 20:50:00 +0000

There's a moment in "Agnes of Iowa," one of the stories in Lorrie Moore's radiant new collection, "Birds of America," in which the title character recalls the good humor that prevailed during her years in Manhattan. "She remembered it had made any given day seem bearable, that impulse toward a joke. It had been a determined sort of humor, an intensity mirroring the intensity of the city, and it seemed to embrace and alleviate the hard sadness of people having used one another and marred the earth the way they had." Then she says: "It was like brains having sex. It was like every brain was a sex maniac."

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.

Birds Of America

Fri, 02 Oct 1998 19:00:00 +0000

The dust jacket of the hardcover "Birds of America," while well-designed, is printed on uncoated paper, without a protective finish to ward off smudges, fingerprints, etc. So just carrying the book around for one day will leave it looking weathered, beaten, defeated, frumpy. Which is apt, given that Lorrie Moore's characters are exactly that: weathered, beaten, defeated, frumpy.

Moore's stories are about these things:

Longing
Suffering
People mistakenly dropping babies on their head in such a way that the baby dies
Depression, or at least life's way of sort of stalling at middle age
Depression, or at least life's way of sort of stalling during that period just before middle age
Depression, or at least life's way of stalling at any age at all, really
Marriages and affairs that are hopeless but serviceable, like a scratchy, Army-issue blanket
Creature comforts in the face of unfaceable pathos
Lives that would warrant suicide if the owner could find the inspiration
Friends who make you laugh
Easy puns
At least one person per story with cancer
Perhaps a child with cancer, too