There are writers, people tell you, you must read before you shuffle off this mortal coil. They are often great, old or dead white men. Hemingway often comes up; Orwell, too, in this internet age. But Lorrie Moore is alive, as are the people she writes about: dark and funny, in the language of the everyday, elevated to high art.
I discovered her in my post-uni 20s, feeding a newfound interest in short stories, from Raymond Carver’s minimal sentences to Nora Ephron’s ebullient ones. My favourite is How To Be An Other Woman, about a woman mired in a situation that is just so horrible; but I inhaled everything I could find. Birds Of America, Self-Help, Like Life. And when a collection of all three (plus extras!) came out, I bought that, too.
Her stories are citrus-sharp and surefooted: they know what they are, and reveal themselves to you slowly, no rushing. In Debarking, Moore writes, “The menu, like love, was full of delicate, gruesome things – cheeks, tongues, thymus glands.” The world in her stories is the real one, rendered more honest, certainly more witty and human. “A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully,” one of her characters, a woman on the cusp of divorce, thinks in Paper Losses, and instantly the reader grasps her core.
That Moore publishes so rarely is a gift in itself, because it compels you to read her over and over. “There’s nothing you can do but write the best book you can,” she told a Paris Review interviewer. So I’d start with Self-Help, or her latest collection, Bark. But it doesn’t really matter: Moore’s a writer you don’t quit.
