The first thing you notice about Lorrie Moore’s stories is that the characters speak in puns. The second thing you notice is that these puns are the characters’ attempt to distance themselves from their situations. In the opening story of her first collection Self-Help, “How to Be Another Woman,” Charlene finds herself dating a married man. Patricia, he tells Charlene, is an attorney. So in her own spare time, waiting for her boyfriend, Charlene ends up making to do lists: “CLIENTS TO SEE- Birthday Snapshots, Scotch Tape, Letters to TD and Mom.” Every time her boyfriend calls after several days of silence, Charlene rejoinders with a joke over the phone when she really wants to tell him how much she cares. Indeed, the theme of each of Moore’s collections, Self-Help, Like Life, and Birds of America touches on the idea of the distance between oneself and one’s life. Self-Help is mostly told in second person. With titles such as “How,” and “To Fill,” it tells the stories of a mysterious “you” as she goes through events, as if telling you, the reader, how to behave in those events. For example, “How to Be Another Woman” opens with the narrator saying you should wait in front of Florsheim’s department store in a raincoat, and meet a stranger with whom you flirt. You later get depressed and find out he is not only cheating with you on his wife, but also on the woman he lives with. This second-person tactic distances whoever the narrator is from the events that are happening.
Like Life collects stories of women and some men who find themselves living the kind of lives like they once envisioned for themselves, but not quite getting it right. There’s the flameout playwright whose doctor girlfriend finally leaves him. There’s the poetess Zoe who finds herself out of place and too snooty for teaching at a Midwestern liberal arts college. There’s the New Jersey homemaker turned conservationist whose son is in jail and daughter never visits. Of course, each of these characters uses humor to cope with themselves. They would be pathetic if it weren’t for the fact that they also recognize the flaws that keep them from what they want. Zoe, for instance, knows she is too picky, especially when it comes to men, to acclimate herself to a happy, Midwestern existence. Moore’s stories document the journeys of discovering these flaws.
Moore fully fleshes out this idea of helplessness in her last collection, Birds of America. While the title doesn’t make any direct appearances in the book, I like to think of it as a reference to the characters’ flightiness. Nearly all the stories center around characters who want to escape their current situations, but feel stuck. Unfortunately, they don’t really know what they need either. Illness often appears as a metaphor for helplessness. In one of the most memorable stories, “People Like Them Are the Only People Here,” a writer copes with her baby’s cancer. Moore documents the writer’s initial disbelief which grows into a final acceptance. The only agency the writer has is to document her baby’s progress, and her family’s experience living in and out of the hospital. “Real Estate” tells about a middle-aged empty nester with terminal cancer. She convinces her husband to move into a new house. Since the house turns out to be a lemon with bats living in the attic, she learns that a simple move can’t solve her problems. Even when the protagonist’s gun lessons culminates in a cathartic, surprising moment, she immediately goes back to her old self.
On one level, Moore’s stories can be seen as demoralizing. After all, America is built on the idea of self improvement. But on the other hand, Moore placates us by showing that self improvement is overrated. It’s key to enjoy our lives in the present instead daydreaming about what could have been.
