While I can't think of a Lorrie Moore story I haven't liked, my first taste of Moore and what she could do, so precisely in the space of only a few paragraphs linked together, was in her collection Self-Help. While the stories work well on their own, they also resonate as a group of characters, people in multiple situations that have collective grievances with the world around them. They might be friends even, getting together on Friday nights to drink and laugh at their achingly dismal lives. Or perhaps they're too disconnected, too dysfunctional for such regularity. The truthfulness (or at least willfulness) that regular meetings with other human beings requires, too much.
Moore's stories taught me about language - how spare it could be while slicing cleanly. Her stories taught me that funny can commingle with pain - how the existence of both magnifies both. How funny, morbidly funny wit, and the right perspective can make horrible things feel real, not just horrible. In raising up the awful, the dismal, the searingly painful and examining it through the lens of wit, Moore not only documents the painful bits in life, but her humor offers hope. Albeit of a sort of whacked out kind of hope...the exact kind I like.
I suspect many of you are familiar with this collection, or certainly her others: Like Life and Birds of America. If you haven't read her work, I encourage you to do so. Her short story collections are all excellent - each story a distinct story, but connected to the others. Each sentence an arrow. So slim, so swift, cutting right to the point. Yet, so many other points are made in the not-empty but stirring air surrounding the arrow as it makes its way to its destination, once thrown. So much said in the not said. Delicious.
It is this quality of Moore's writing (spare, economical, searing) and the way she groups her collections of stories (characters that might dine or weep together if given the chance) that always confuses me when speaking of her novels: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital and Anagrams. I can never quite remember which is a short story collection and which is a novel...so interlinked are her stories, they are filed away in my mind as novels. Or stories. Or a novel told in stories. Which is how her novels feel. Equally delectable.
If by some terrible chance of fate or a cosmic chink in your reading chain, you've not come to read her stories, I offer you the first few lines of each story in Self-Help. To whet your appetite. To show you what you're missing. To get you off your duff and out to the store to get these stories now, now, now:
How to Be an Other Woman: "Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie."
What is Seized: "My mother married a cold man."
The Kid's Guide to Divorce: "Put extra salt on the popcorn because your mom'll say that she needs it because the part where Inger Berman almost dies and the camera does tricks to elongate her torso sure gets her every time."
How: "Begin by meeting him in a class, in a bar, at a rummage sale. Maybe he teaches sixth grade. Manages a hardware store. Foreman at a carton factory. He will be a good dancer. He will have perfectly cut hair. He will laugh at your jokes."
Go Like This: "I have written before. Three children's books: William, Willam Takes a Trip, More William. Perhaps you've heard of them."
How to Talk to your Mother (Notes): "1982. Without her, for years now, murmur at the defrosting refrigerator, 'What?' 'Huh?' 'Shush now,' as it creaks, aches, groans until the final ice block drops from the ceiling of the freezer like something vanquished."
Amhal and the Night Visitors: A Guide to the Tenor of Love: "11/30. Understand that your cat is a whore and can't help you. She takes on love with the whiskery adjustments of a gold-digger."
To Fill: "There is no dignity in appetites."
How to Become A Writer: "First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age -- say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving you for mountain. Count the syllables. Show it to your mom. She is tough and practical. She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair. She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots. She'll look briefly at your writing, then back up at you with a face blank as a donut. She'll say: 'How about emptying the dishwasher?' Look away. Shove the forks in the fork drawer. Accidentally break one of the freebie gas station glasses. This is the required pain and suffering. This is only for starters."
My, it is lovely when your face hurts from smiling -- from reading.