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Lorrie Moore, Story by Story
I interview people. I just interviewed author Lorrie Moore. A few years ago, I interviewed Emmylou Harris. In that interview, we went over the singer's new record song by song. For this interview I decided to go over Lorrie Moore's new book, Birds of America, story by story.
"Oh?" she says, after I explain. "That's very interesting. I feel stories are very close to songs. They have the same urgency and intensity."
Not only are Moore's stories urgent and intense, but they're peppered with great "zingers" -- terrific verbal bits; like a character who says, "Marriage is the film school of the 90s." Or the ones referred to as "cube steak yuppies." I figure Moore has overheard these quips in a restaurant or at a mall, but she tells me that these particular ones are inventions. "I just imagine the sensibility of a character and then imagine them saying something like that." She does confess that she walks around with a notebook. "That's what writers are suppose to do. Do you carry one?"
"Yes," I say. "But I believe if something is important I'll remember it."
"You can get suckered into thinking that," she says. "Sometimes things seem to be on fire in front of you and you're thinking, 'Ah! I'll never forget that.' But you will." Pause. "You always will."
Always? Moore gives that dour pronouncement with such finality that I'm quiet for a good long moment. Then I begin interviewing her about each of Birds of America's 12 cuts -- er, stories....
"Willing"
The book's opening story is about a second-rate movie star who flees Hollywood to hide out in a motel in Chicago. "Have you done Hollywood?" I ask Moore.
"Done Hollywood?" she says.
"Gone out there."
"No," she answers. "It's not like I usually write about actresses. I imagined my way into that bit of midwestern exile." Have you ever holed up in a strange city in a strange motel? "No," she laughs. "Oh no. No. No. I've never done something that depressed. But it was easy for me to imagine it."
Note about Lorrie Moore's laugh: She laughs a lot, and her laugh is delightful. It's neither a giggle nor cackle. And she's not laughing for my benefit. Her laugh seems the call of a woman who is truly amused by existence.
"Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People"
"Have you ever taken a trip with your mother?" I ask.
She gives that laugh. I asked what I asked because this story is about an American mother who forces her adult daughter to kiss the Blarney Stone. "I did go to Ireland," Moore tells me. "But I did not go with my mother." Did you kiss the stone? "I did. It was pretty much that awful." What did your mother think about the story? "Anytime your parents see a father or mother character, they get very nervous," she says. "Now, my mother knows she never went to Ireland with me and she knows it's fiction, but the story makes her nervous." Then she adds, "And I wouldn't know what to think if I had a child who was a writer."
"Dance in America," "Community Life," and "Beautiful Grade"
The first title is a very good, very short story only peripherally about the subject of the title. The next is about a Transylvanian-born librarian coping with life in America. The last concerns divorce and how "the young were sent to earth to amuse the old." For these tales, Moore and I talk shop on the mechanics of being a short story writer. I've always found short stories harder to get published than novels. I assume Moore gets every one of her stories placed immediately.
"Oh, God no," she says.
"Do you still get -- " I say...
"Rejections?" she says. "Sure. Sure." I don't believe her! Surely she's lying.... "Not everybody likes everything that you do," she insists. "Maybe John Updike never gets rejections. I don't know."
Okay. Maybe she's telling the truth.
"Agnes of Iowa"
"What color is your hair?" is my next question.
"What color is my hair?" she repeats.
"Have you ever dyed it red?" Ah. Now she knows that I am referring to the Iowa woman in the story who dyes her hair red during a trip to New York City -- "her bright, new, and terrible hair" (and Moore means "terrible" like "Ivan the Terrible").
Moore reveals that her hair is brown. We then talk about Manhattan. It turns out that we both lived in Little Italy during the mid-1980s. She doesn't realize that she was subletting across the street from John Gotti's social club. "You undoubtedly made numerous walk-on appearances on FBI surveillance footage," I tell her.
She laughs.
"Charades"
This is a Christmas story about adults playing charades with their aging parents, pantomiming such things as "arachnophobia" ("the whole concept, rather than working syllable by syllable"), as well as famous people such as Robert Oppenheimer (after the mother falls on the floor pantomiming an explosion, her son mistakenly thinks she's depicting "dizziness" for "Dizzy Gillespie"). "I write about Christmas too much," Moore says. "Christmas is a kind of a muse for me. I don't know why. During the holidays things occur to me. Maybe it's because of the upheaval of traveling and meeting with families." (Another of Moore's Yuletide musings, entitled "Chop Suey Xmas," will be collected in the upcoming book of essays We Are What We Ate: 24 Memories of Food.)
"Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens"
This story concerns a woman's holiday-season trips to a shrink in an attempt to come to grips with the death of her cat. So I tell Moore about what has just happened up at Times Square -- a scaffold collapsed, and tenants had to flee a residential hotel. Now the police won't let them back up into their rooms to retrieve their pets. A number of cats, gerbils, and fish have been locked up for six days now.
"That's so mean," Moore says.
"I've made this moral judgment," I tell her. "I think the cats should be rescued."
"But forget about the gerbils and fish -- I agree."
"I don't know what St. Francis would say."
"He might say 'include the gerbils,'" Moore states. "But I think he would draw the line at the fish."
"What You Want to Do Fine"
I mispronounce the title to Moore as, "What You Want to Do IsFine."
"This is why Harper changed it to 'Lucky Ducks,'" she says. "What can you do? You either accept these things or yank your story. I told them the title of the book was going to be Birds of America."
Lucky Ducks, Birds of America -- jeez.
"In that caption where they mention my forthcoming book, they did not mention the title," she says.
"Real Estate"
In this 35-page story, the word "Ha!" is repeated 1,140 times over two complete pages. "That must have been fun to write," I say.
"I have to say, this kind of thing worried my editor at Knopf," Moore says. "She told me, 'As my mother used to say, it's your dress. You're going to have to wear it.'"
"People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk"
This is a hospital drama about a "Father" and "Mother" and their seriously ill "Baby."
"Did you name the mother character the Mother to distance yourself from the events you were describing?" I ask.
"I think the idea was that in this horrible drama, there were roles. There was 'the Baby.' And 'the Mother.' And 'the Doctor,'" she says. "I began to use the roles as important in themselves. The names didn't matter."
She then reveals that this was the only story she wrote in 1996, the result of an overpowering experience with her own child.
"Terrific Mother"
Ha! (Only once....) Nothing like a little self-effacing irony. This story begins: "Although she had been around them her whole life, it was when she reached 35 that holding babies seemed to make her nervous...." Ally McBeal shouldn't read this story -- especially the part where the protagonist's boyfriend asks her to marry him: "I'm going to marry you whether you like it or not...I'm going to marry you till you puke." This 40-page story about their screwy honeymoon in Italy says as much about modern marriage as a full-length novel.
My final question is, "Do you consider yourself a short story writer or a novelist or both?"
"I am asked this a lot," Moore says. "You'd think I'd have a pat answer by now." She's silent a moment, then says, "Obviously I've written more short stories than novels. If you've written 35 short stories, you sort of feel like you're a short story writer, and if you've only written two novels you may be making grandiose claims for yourself by calling yourself a novelist. I would like to be both. I'm working on a novel now. I'm at the very beginning of it." Then she adds, "But, as I began to say, I'm a short story writer. It's not something I will ever leave entirely."
Now let me, the interviewer, ask you, the reader, a question: Any of you FBI agents? If so, check the surveillance tapes you made of John Gotti back in the '80s. Look for the female pedestrian who keeps passing on the street holding a cube of laundry wrapped in brown paper from her favorite Russian laundry on Mulberry Street. Spot her? Good. That woman is Lorrie Moore. She's the best short story writer practicing her craft in America today, and Birds of America is her crowning achievement.
David Bowman
Dave Eggers
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
Still, though, it's important to remember that
Moore, while fascinated almost exclusively with
broken people, is among the very funniest writers
alive. She is known for this, and other writers are
known for this, too, I guess, but there is perhaps
no other writer who balances the two so
precariously, so perfectly. She is God to her
characters' Job, throwing at them every
conceivable calamity or handicap. In exchange,
they get the great lines. For instance, the
middle-aged gay man (who is also blind) in "What
You Want to Do Fine," burdened by thoughts of
war -- this is set just before the Gulf War -- and
mortality, goes on a road trip with his
middle-aged, formerly straight-and-married lover,
Mack, and nevertheless ends up attending an
AIDS memorial and again and again driving
through cemeteries. As a reward, at the St. Louis
Arch, Moore allows them this exchange:
"Describe the view to me," says Quilty
when they get out at the top. Mack
looks out through the windows.
"Adequate," he says.
Before this, Moore has done the following: First
there was Self-Help (short stories, all sad, all
funny); then there was Anagrams (a novel,
despairing, hopeless, hilarious); then Like Life
(more stories, largely interchangeable with those
in Self Help, small slices of unassuming
tragicomedy). Then came a second novel, Who
Will Run the Frog Hospital? a coming-of-age
story about two young girls, which was, like all of
her work, carefully and often gorgeously written,
but also sort of soft, and perhaps too wistful, and
maybe not so rich in detail. It was not so funny.
And it was not so mean.
But she is both funny and mean in Birds of
America, her new collection of stories, 12 of
them, and this is good. Here the extremes are
more extreme. Here the wit is more savage and
the compassion more breathtaking. And here the
formal experiments are more daring, and more
successful. In "Real Estate," a woman reflects on
her husband's various mistresses:
Of course, it had always been the
spring that she discovered her
husband's affairs. But the last one was
years ago, and what did she care
about all that now? There had been a
parade of flings -- in the end, they'd
made her laugh: Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
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Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha!
It goes on like that for two pages. Just the "Ha!"s,
for two pages. The passage rounds out with this:
"The key to marriage, she concluded, was just
not to take the thing too personally."
Resigned, heartbreaking, all that. Even so, while
Moore's characters are beaten and weathered,
cuckolded and tired, even while, by the way, the
woman who has accepted her husband's
philandering also has cancer, these stories are, to
the last, nothing if not affirming, nothing if not
joyful. How?
That's unclear. But know this: That she achieves
this balance again and again -- while stretching
her wings stylistically and broadening her palette
in this, far and away, her best book -- is itself
affirming. And joyous. -- Salon
New Yorker
Moore peers into America's loneliest perches, but her delicate touch turns absurdity into a warming vitality.
Mirabella
In Birds of AmericaMoore achieves an altogether new level of grace.
San Francisco Chronicle
One could be trapped in an elevator with people like Moore's [and] feel the luckier for it.
Michiko Kakutani
At once sad, funny, lyrical and prickly, Birds of America attests to the deepening emotional chiaroscuro of her wise and beguiling work.
New York Times
Julian Barnes
Her depth of focus has increased, and with it her emotional seriousness. I hestiate to lay the adjective wise on one of her age. But watching a writer move into full maturity is always exciting. Flappy-winged take-off is fun; but the sign of an artist soaring lifts the heart.
New York Review of Books
James McManus
It will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability. . .Fluid, cracked, mordant, colloquial, Moore's sentences hold, even startle, us. . .Birds of America, while often light-hearted and steadily hilarious, is a sublimely dark book. . . .her most potent work so far.
New York Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Though the characters in these 12 stories are seen in such varied settings as Iowa, Ireland, Maryland, Louisiana and Italy, they are all afflicted with ennui, angst and aimlessness. They can't communicate or connect; they have no inner resources; they can't focus; they can't feel love. The beginning stories deal with women alienated from their own true natures but still living in the quotidian. Aileen in 'Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens,' is unable to stop grieving over her pet's death, although she has a loving husband and daughter to console her. The collection's two male protagonists, a law professor in 'Beautiful Grade' and a housepainter who lives with a blind man in 'What You Want To Do Fine,' are just as disaffected and lonely in domestic situations. The stories move on, however, to situations in which life itself is askew, where a tumor grows in a baby's body (the detached recitation of 'People Like That Are The Only People Here' makes it even more harrowing ). In 'Real Estate,' a woman with cancer -- after having dealt with squirrels, bats, geese, crows and a hippie intruder in her new house -- kills a thief whose mind has run as amok as the cells in her body. Only a few stories conclude with tentative affirmation. 'Terrific Mother,' which begins with the tragedy of a child's death, moves to a redemptive ending. In every story, Moore empowers her characters with wit, allowing their thoughts and conversation to sparkle with wordplay, sarcastic banter and idioms used with startling originality. No matter how chaotic their lives, their minds still operate at quip speed; the emotional impact of their inner desolation is expressed in gallows humor. Moore's insights into the springs of human conduct, her ability to catch the moment that flips someone from eccentric to unmoored, endow her work with a heartbreaking resonance. Strange birds, these characters might be, but they are present everywhere. (PW best book of 1998)
Library Journal
Moore has written remarkably varied stories about sadness, crisis, and death. A dysfunctional family plays charades. A woman mourns the death of her cat. Bill traces his melancholy back to the death of his favored sister. A straight man tries a gay relationship while contemplating the kidnap of his son. Particularly difficult and poignant are the stories about the deaths of children. The stories are well written, remarkable in their clarity, full of gut-wrenching description and dialog. Some have lighter moments, but this is not enough to save the book from being dark and depressing. There is only so much misery a reader can endure. Let's hope this artist's "blue period" is brief. Recommended in small doses. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/98.]--Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Watch Hill
Jeff Giles
[A] fiercely funny book about great and tiny jolts to the heart, about the push and pull of relationships. . .Moore is already regarded as one of her generation's wittiest and shrewdest writers. Her lovely sentences, goofy puns and wisecracks stick in the brain like song lyrics. . .Her life is hers. Her work, thank heavens, is ours. -- Newsweek
Michiko Kakutani
At once sad, funny, lyrical and prickly, Birds of America attests to the deepening emotional chiaroscuro of her wise and beguiling work. -- The New York Times
James McManus
It will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability. . .Fluid, cracked, mordant, colloquial, Moore's sentences hold, even startle, us. . .Birds of America, while often light-hearted and steadily hilarious, is a sublimely dark book. . . .her most potent work so far. -- The New York Times Book Review
R.Z. Sheppard
The bemused and angry women in Birds defiantly quip their way through trouble. . . . .if publishing goes flat, [Moore] can always get a booking in Vegas. -- Time Magazine
People Magazine
...[M]akes up stories about people who seem real and weirdly important....Even more important are the vivid images of things we thought we already knew....Moore can show you these daily wonders -- and more.
Kirkus Reviews
A fine new collection of 12 stories notable for their verbal wit and range of intellectual referencethe third such from the highly praised author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Like Life. Moore's most typical characters are women in retreat from disappointing relationships or in search of someone or thing to relieve their solitude. One example is the eponymous protagonist of 'Agnes of Iowa,' an unhappily married night-school teacher whose longing 'to be a citizen of the globe!' is not assuaged by her brief encounter with a visiting South African poet. Another is the 'minor movie star' of 'Willing,' whose involvement with an auto mechanic can't repair the unbridgeable distance she's put between herself and other people. Or, in a practically perfect little story (neatly titled 'Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens'), there's the housewife who mourns her dead cat, is chastened by her husband's understandable exasperation, yet is still gripped by 'the mystery of interspecies love.' Moore writes knowingly about family members who tiptoe warily around the edges of loving one another ('Charades'), who discover vulnerability where they had previously seen only dispassionate strength ('Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People'), or who learn to live, say, with the possibility of a baby dying ('People Like That Are the Only People Here').
Though her characters are likeably tough-minded and funny (who wouldn't want to cry 'Fire!' in a crowded theater where Forrest Gump is playing?), they invariably manifest a feeling that life is passing too quickly and that we haven't made all the necessary arrangements. Accordingly, her hip, jokey mode is lessaffecting than her wistful, how-the-hell-did-I-end-up-here tone. In Moore's skillful hands, a new homeowner pestered by squirrels in the attic and a modest woman subjected to a pelvic exam by a roomful of medical students are altogether credible contemporary Cassandras and Medeas. She's an original, and she's getting better with every book.
From the Publisher
A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME • A New York Times Book of the Year • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Winner of the Salon Book Award • A Village Voice Book of the Year
“Fluid, cracked, mordant, colloquial…. Stand[s] by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous collection…. Her stories are tough, lean, funny, and metaphysical…. Birds of America has about it a wild beauty that simply makes one feel more connected to life.” —The Boston Globe
“At once sad, funny, lyrical and prickly, Birds of America attests to the deepening emotional chiaroscuro of her wise and beguiling work.” —The New York Times
“Stunning…. There’s really no one like Moore; in a perfect marriage of art form and mind, she has made the short story her own.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Birds of America stands as a major work of American short fiction…. Absolutely mastered.” —Elle
“Wonderful…. These stories impart such terrifying truths.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
“Lorrie Moore soars with Birds of America.... A marvelous, fiercely funny book.” —Newsweek
“Fifty years from now, it may well turn out that the work of very few American writers has as much to say about what it means to be alive in our time as that of Lorrie Moore.” —Harper’s Magazine
“A nest of tales that captures the eternal, hummingbird flutter of the human heart. . . . A volume in which everything comes together: the author's mordant, Dorothy Parker wit, the Joycean epiphanies, the Flannery O’Connor-esque moments of clarity and grace.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“These new stories sparkle; they are keenly and poignantly mindful of the idioms, banalities and canards of contemporary American society, and they hum with Moore’s earmark droll and incisive banter, her astonishing ability to render the intricacy of character in a few sharply focused details.” —Houston Chronicle
“Cements [Moore’s] reputation as one of our finest writers of fiction.” —Austin American-Statesman
“Lorrie Moore has made laughingstocks of all of us. And we’re devotedly, blissfully grateful. . . . Moore . . . packs more rambunctious American humor and worldly-wide melancholy into a story than many lesser writers can into an entire novel.” —Newsday
“[Moore] uses language to create a kind of carbonated prose: sentences with pop and fizz, with an effervescence of imagination that continually surprises.” —The Dallas Morning News
“Bats, flamingos, crows, performing ducks and bird feeders crop up in every story, but the real subject is human nature and the myriad ways Moore’s characters flock together or fly apart in the face of change, stasis or grief. . . . Gorgeous. . . . Rarely has a writer achieved such consistency, humor and compassion.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“[Moore’s] dialogue snaps with fun. . . . One could be trapped in an elevator with people like Moore’s men, or especially her women, and feel the luckier for it.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Remains one of the . . . best volumes of stories that any American has published in recent decades.” —Bookforum
“I hesitate to lay the adjective wise on one of [Moore’s] age. But watching a writer move into full maturity is always exciting. Flappy-winged take-off is fun; but the sight of an artist soaring lifts the heart.” —Julian Barnes, The New York Review of Books
“Written beautifully, flawlessly, carefully, with a trademark gift for the darkly comic and the perfectly observed. . . . Thrilling.” —Esquire
“Moore peers into America’s loneliest perches, but her delicate touch turns absurdity into a warming vitality.” —The New Yorker
“I’ve long been an admirer of Lorrie Moore; her Birds of America is an exquisite collection of stories by a writer at the peak of her form.” —Geoff Dyer, The Independent
“Moore is blessed with such astonishing, unbridled inventiveness she leaves the rest of us hamstrung mortals blinking in the dust. . . . Moore writes like a force of nature.” —Seattle Times
“Memorable and absorbing.” —The Wall Street Journal
“These stories . . . are revelations of insight, the perception of the daily traumas of modern existence raised to ironic levels that tell us who we really are.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Moore is the quintessential short-story writer. There is not a word wasted—her every observation is burnished with humor and sadness.” —Marie Claire
“Terrific.” —Time Out New York
“Exquisite. . . . Come across these lines in the presence of another human being, and just try to resist reading them aloud.” —San Diego Union-Tribune
“Brilliant.” —Bookreporter
“A fine collection. . . . The reader will be forever susceptible to seeing absurdity everywhere.” —Chicago Tribune
“The sleight of hand that goes on within a Lorrie Moore story is one of supreme subtlety and wit. . . . By turns laugh-out-loud funny and poignantly sad.” —Detroit Free Press
“One of the best short story collections of the ‘90s.” —PopMatters
“Firece, heart-wrenching. . . . One of the most remarkable short works published in recent decades, it’s unforgettable and great.” —Philadelphia Tribune
JULY 2019 - AudioFile
In this collection of short stories by the razor-sharp Lorrie Moore, Natasha Soudek’s narration often drips with the irony and wry wit for which Moore is known. The writing is artful, capturing complex characters with complex emotions, even within the constraints of the short story format. The 12 stories are varied, ranging from a couple’s attendance of an academic retreat in Italy to the tribulations of a family undergoing their baby son’s treatment for cancer and the experiences of a gay couple taking a road trip. Throughout the stories, Soudek does a better job voicing the female protagonists than the males. Overall, she captures Moore’s droll, biting humor with her sardonic tone and unhurried pace. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine