It has been more than a decade since the American writer Lorrie Moore published her last novel, the Women’s prize-shortlisted A Gate at the Stairs, although there has been a collection of stories and an anthology of essays in between. Like Donna Tartt, the rarity with which Moore publishes adds to the cachet of a writer often hailed as the best of her generation; most celebrated for her wisecracking, often heartbreaking short stories, she has been called “the nearest thing we have to Chekhov”. In 2020 her stories were published as part of the Everyman Library, an honour usually reserved for dead writers and her hero Alice Munro. “It felt a little posthumous,” Moore joked at the time.
“I’m a very slow writer,” she says simply, on a video call from Berlin, where she has spent the winter. Her latest novel, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, is her fourth and she has published four collections of stories. She describes the new novel as “a political ghost story and a personal ghost story”. She started writing it shortly after her last collection, Bark, was published in 2014, but showed it to no one, not even her longterm agent, because she didn’t think anyone would get it. “It’s just too nutty.”
