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Lorrie Moore depicts 
everyday subjects and 
how we relate to them

December 27, 2009 


MADISON, Wis. — You have to be willing to have only a few friends, Lorrie Moore said.

Writers, if they are honest with themselves, cannot worry about offending or how many allies they have acquired in this world. It's an obnoxious position, hard to defend. But they do not work for the Chamber of Commerce ; they are not examples to the community. They are there for their story, and if it sounds harsh ...

Well, maybe.

She said this nicely.

We got on the subject because I mentioned she is one of those writers from whom readers take cues on how to live, and how not to.

"I hope not," she said.

Then she considered the point a moment — a point that John Cheever and Raymond Carver and Alice Munro and the other short story masters she is routinely lumped in with have all heard — and she said, somewhat coyly, "I always thought people read for company."

Perhaps, but for 25 years, Moore has been the kind of writer who "brings that eerie quality to a story that suggests someone has eavesdropped on your thoughts," New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman told me. "And that's because Lorrie gets to the heart of how people talk right now, how they fumble words, and blame, and miscommunicate. She captures the social tics that spill across speech. No one has captured that — or how we live now — as well. I can't see Lorrie writing historical novels."

That said, hers is not a brand of incisiveness without hurt or disgust, and Moore, who emerged with a new best-seller, a novel ("A Gate at the Stairs"), a few months ago after a 10-year absence, and who started the year by eulogizing John Updike (who, conversely, included Moore's "You're Ugly, Too" in the "Best American Short Stories of the Century"), and who is ending the year on scores of best-of-2009 lists, still comes off as funny as she is abrasive.

Her subjects remain everyday — relationships, family. But her talent for showcasing everyday absurdities and pangs of regret, and the way people habitually joke instead of discuss, is less common. The Illinois history professor in "You're Ugly, Too," for instance, visiting friends in New York , becomes so bored with a guy who corners her on the balcony at a Halloween party that, for a moment, she begins to push him over the balcony — only to apologize.

Indeed, near the end of "A Gate at the Stairs," Moore's 20-year-old protagonist, who becomes nanny to a semi-precious bohemian Wisconsin couple, decides that when talking with people about impossible subjects, "to ease the suffering of the listener, things had better be funny."

"I always took her to be an incredibly compassionate writer," said former Chicago theater director Abigail Deser , who staged a series of readings based on Moore's stories at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004.

"But if her work gets under your skin, I suppose it's because people think saying good things about others is the same as compassion, and she knows the difference."

Moore and I sat in an upscale neighborhood bistro — "great moules frites," she says. It's the kind of restaurant that didn't exist in Madison when she moved here, about the time "Self-Help" (1985), her first collection, was published. The titles of her stories then, many written while she was in graduate school at Cornell University , "How To Be an Other Woman," "How to Talk to Your Mother," "How to Become a Writer" ("First, try to do something, anything, else"), were often deeply ironic parodies of the notion that good fiction should be cathartic and instructive.

Nevertheless, I raised, for a second time, the idea that her work was perversely instructive. She said she didn't really believe in "work that gives instruction, which would be silly. If a work is complex, there should be 10 contradictory morals, and any lessons won't be recognizable. Neither will the pieces pulled from life. You tell people they are not in a work because they aren't, if you're doing your job."

She teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin — she's been in the English Department since she was 27, when she was the youngest member of the department in its history.

That was 25 years ago, when she moved to Madison from upstate New York . Anyway, her students, she says, "they don't feel the transgressive nature of literature yet. Especially undergrads. They worry about offending people, and that's fine. They don't want to upset people. They show their writing to their parents. To their parents! I say, 'OK, Becky, now write something you wouldn't show your parents.' Becky says, 'I couldn't!' But, see — they're nice kids."

Moore slaps the bistro table lightly and takes a sip from her Belgian wheat ale.

Moore is 52 now.

She decided this would be the last stop on her book tour, meaning the last stop would take place in private, a block or so from her home, which was built 100 years ago and is tall and yellow and, on the day I arrive, bordered with a brown moat of thick dead leaves. She didn't want anyone in her home, she said apologetically. She just doesn't like journalists to see the flotsam of her life. Besides, her son had the swine flu. But also, I suspect, it's convenient for Moore, who's never been much on soliciting attention. She is not unfriendly, and, yes, she still has friends, despite three decades of short stories and novels that keenly see through the pretensions of high-minded college-town types and discombobulated urban dwellers. (The title of one of her best stories, "People Like That Are the Only People Here," could be the title of half of her stories.) During a long conversation, she is not at all guarded about her personal life in Madison — nuggets of information slip out, a divorce years ago, her teenage son's health issues.

But for someone who knows a certain tasteful, upper middle-class, vaguely trendy, socially conscious, politically lazy category of American intimately — speaking to one of her editors, I kept referring to Madison as Evanston , until we decided the distinction was minor — Moore herself has retained a modest profile.

"I'm not deliberately hiding up here," she replied.

"But I am a single mom, and my kid has swine flu, and I just came back from Denver , and I don't have the strength to write all the time, and I want that person to be separate from the work. I'm not a confessional person. My life is not very interesting anyway. I don't do anything."

She says this, partly, to explain why it took a decade to turn in the follow-up to "Birds of America," her acclaimed 1998 collection.

"The feeling that the world is getting away from you is not a good feeling for a writer," she said. She hears this from writer friends. She also said another reason it takes her longer now perhaps is that her writing is changing, partly because her relationship with Madison changed.

"Lorrie was complete when we first published her, the total package," said Victoria Wilson , who has edited each of Moore's books at Knopf. "But she is growing, less minimalist, more heartfelt and sophisticated, than she was in the 1980s. Her voice is still there, but there's less stylishness now."

Recently, a collection of her complete stories was published in England .

Which meant Moore had to read everything she's ever written. "It was a nightmare. As you read, you think it's pretty good, then you hit something so awful, you wonder if you knew the difference between good and bad writing. I guess I didn't. All I could think was how I would never write those stories now. Not at all.

"I don't feel like a stranger in a strange land, like I did when I first moved to the Midwest. Madison was cheap then. You couldn't find Thai food, or even a good bagel. Those were things I resented. But there's a sameness that's sweeping the country. The Midwest is losing whatever made it so foreign. The South — same thing. I wrote a lot from that dislocation. Someone's visiting, and there's disruption. It's a classic story construction, and maybe there's just less of a reason for it now."

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Christopher Borrelli : cborrelli@tribune.com

 


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