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.”
Set, we quickly guess, in 2016, it follows history teacher Finn on a Faulkner-esque road trip across Kentucky with the decaying corpse of his troubled lover Lily in the passenger seat and cat litter in the boot. Meanwhile, in a hospice in New York, his brother Max is dying of cancer. “I’m cruel,” Moore deadpans of the blows heaped on hapless Finn. “I’m just cruel. What can I tell you?”
Interspersed with Finn’s travails are fictional journals and letters by a woman running a boarding house during the civil war. Moore was inspired by accounts of a man who claimed to be wheeling the mummified body of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, across the southern states in the 1960s and 70s. Together these two stories make the point that “the spirit of the Confederacy is still around”, she explains. “And having its way again in the presidential elections.”
Her heart sank when George Saunders’s Booker-winning Lincoln in the Bardo, which has a similarly ghoulish humour, was published in 2017. “I thought, ‘Oh no. I’ve taken so long to write this book, and George has already written it.’” But she was relieved to find that despite a shared obsession with Lincoln (“his life just breaks your heart”), they were doing very different things.
Moore’s short, sometimes devastating novel can be read as a metaphor for the nation’s shameful past, for recent political craziness, fake news and conspiracy theories – even the climate crisis (in a particularly grisly analogy, Lily’s body resurfaces because the frozen earth melts). And yes, it is quite nutty. But it is also, as always with Moore, very funny, with plenty of opportunities for her trademark gallows humour. As a character in one of her short stories says: “Nothing’s a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.”
“I sort of see this book as not very funny. But maybe I’m wrong,” Moore says, holding her hand to her mouth to stifle a giggle, an endearing habit that, like her fiction, gives the impression she is always suppressing a joke. “I kind of saw it more as a grief-stricken book than a funny one.”
You don’t read Moore for plot – “Plots are for dead people,” the narrator tells us in her much-quoted early short story How to Become a Writer. You read her for her whip-smart voice (surely talking especially to you) and the precipitous lurches from high tragedy to everyday absurdity that have earned her a cult following since her first collection Self-Help was published in 1985, when she was 28. And you read her for her humour – each story, slim and bright and brittle as an ice pop, seemed irresistibly fresh and daring back in the 80s and 90s, when her peers were grappling with the Great American Novel.
She is a serious writer unafraid of combining jokes and puns with formal experimentalism, in a way that has been much imitated since. One story about the wife of a serially unfaithful husband runs to several pages of bitter “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” You feel her pain. And despite the breeziness, there is much sadness in Moore’s fictional worlds – infidelity, terminal illness and suicide have been recurring themes since the beginning. As the novelist Lauren Groff wrote of Moore’s most famous story, 1997’s People Like That Are the Only People Here, about parents dealing with their baby’s cancer diagnosis, it “wears its wit like the pitch-black bravado of a man facing a firing squad”.
Now 66, Moore retains in conversation as on the page the wry sprightliness that has made her such a distinctive presence in American fiction, although her work has got darker over the years. Written against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s election and the pandemic, the grief in her new novel is at once public and private. “I’m obsessed with death, all writers are obsessed with death,” she says. “It’s the great darkness that enters other people’s lives. For the person dying, who knows? But for the person who is losing someone it is a tremendous drama and a tremendous story of loss. The luckiest lives have death in them. And then they are the unlucky ones.”
And it is no longer just a morbid fascination. “I’m getting older and a lot of people have died,” she says. “There’s starting to be more people on the other side, in terms of those I’ve loved, than there are on this side. It sounds so terrible.”
Both her parents, who were in their 90s, died in the last few years, her father during the early days of the pandemic. Moore prefers to say “he died with Covid”, as no one was quite sure at the time. It was chaos in the hospital, she says. “There was no way of being close, everything was done through screens. I couldn’t hold his hand. The nurses could come in with their latex gloves and kind of pet him. It was the most heartbreaking thing, to see your dear old dad die this way.”
She described the experience in a story, Face Time – “Three times daily, visored, hazmatted nurses dressed like bee keepers popped in and out of the room” – published in the New Yorker in September 2020, because “I didn’t know what else to write. It was the only thing on my mind,” she says. “I was very sad.”
She is currently staying at the American Academy, a beautiful villa on the shores of Lake Wannsee in Berlin, researching her next book, based on her father’s visit to Germany in 1936. (The windows of the Academy are bomb-proof, apparently, because the Nazi minister who owned it during the war was worried about being attacked from the lakeside.) Like I Am Homeless, it will be a mix of history and present-day narrative.
In a few days she is flying back to Madison, Wisconsin, where she has “a house and son”, before returning to Nashville, where she has “a job and an apartment”. After 30 years teaching creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she is now professor of English at Vanderbilt University, which means a lot of travelling – a 10-hour drive – between the two cities. “It’s a little crazy.” The homelessness of the title does not allude to those lost hours on the interstate, but “a sense of being at home in life and the world, and people who don’t feel at home in life and in the world”, she explains. Set before the pandemic, it is about “all the ways we fail each other even in regular times”, and this sense of failure, or emotional carelessness, in our closest relationships runs throughout her fiction.
Then there is the question of political or national failure; even before Covid, these were far from regular times. “Don’t check out of this life thinking Trump’s going to be president,” Finn implores his dying brother. “Don’t go with that hallucination or I will really feel sorry for you.”
At first Moore wasn’t too “panicked” at the prospect of a Trump administration. “When you watched all the people in the Republican party running in the primaries in 2016, Trump seemed the dopiest, the silliest, but also in some ways the least frightening,” she explains now. “When someone would bring up Trump, I would be rather casual and dismissive, because I felt this constant referendum on him was just playing his game. He’s just a narcissistic show-business person. He has no politics. He’s an empty suit. Now,” she adds dryly, “it’s turned into a worse show than we had hoped for.”
On a visit to Buenos Aires just before the pandemic, she was amazed to discover that her second novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, the story of an intense teenage friendship made closer when one of the girls gets pregnant, had been taken up by young women in Argentina as part of their campaign for the right to “legal, safe, and free abortion”, which resulted in a bill being passed in 2020. She remembers saying: “You’re all going to have to come to the United States after this, because we’re going in the opposite direction.” Now, she says, “the supreme court is a nightmare. That’s going to be Trump’s legacy.”
At this point, her laptop starts to overheat and she has to lift it up to let it cool down a little. “It’s very old,” she apologises.
“But I still find George W Bush really the worst president of my adult life,” she continues, her face floating appropriately ghost-like as the screen wobbles in her hands. Really? Worse than Trump? “In terms of the number of people who’ve died? Yes. Trump didn’t start a war.”
The Iraq war casts a shadow over her 2009 novel A Gate at the Stairs. Set in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it is a coming-of-age story about a young woman, Tassie, who goes to college in the midwest and becomes very involved with the family she works for as a nanny. Writing I Am Homeless, Moore was struck by the fact that the main character in each of her novels neglects a sibling for a new infatuation, with tragic consequences, such as Tassie’s brother joining the military. “My sense of story must have to do with somehow turning your back on something that needs you for something that doesn’t need you,” she reflects now. “And a love story, or a story of infatuation, is never something that is useful. But it’s something we’re susceptible to.” I Am Homeless is dedicated to her sister and two brothers.
One of four siblings (who are all doing fine), Moore grew up in Glens Falls, a small town in upstate New York on the edge of the Adirondack mountains. It was a fairly conservative upbringing: her parents would read passages from the Bible at the dinner table before dessert each evening. They were also members of an amateur operatic society, and the young Lorrie (her real name is Marie Lorena after her grandmother) spent what she recalls as “the most enchanted and culturally formative moments of my childhood” watching their rehearsals on Sunday afternoons. It is from this, perhaps, that she developed her ear for what she calls “the makeshift theatre” that people construct in awkward situations, and from which much of the humour in her work arises.
Moore moved to New York to work as a paralegal before taking the plunge to become a writer. And from the early stories of unhappy young women adrift in big cities in the collections Self-Help and Like Life, to her unforgettable stories of motherhood in Birds of America (People Like That Are the Only People Here was based on her discovery that her baby son had cancer), to the disappointed divorcees in Bark (Moore split from her husband, a divorce lawyer, in 2001), her fiction has followed a similar trajectory to her life. But she is reticent about talking about her life outside her fiction.
She put off reading the proofs of the Everyman Library Collected Stories until after they had been sent to press because she couldn’t bear the idea of rereading all her stories. She is always surprised when students tell her they love Self-Help or any of her earlier stories. “There’s no technology in those books,” she says. “There’s none of the things that young people care about and that are part of young people’s lives. I can’t go back and read them and so I don’t want other people to. I want them to read where I am now.”
Short stories demand the stamina to put in 12-hour stints, she has said, but writing a novel can be managed in regular sessions each morning. “The hardest part of any novel is the middle,” she says now. “Because you feel like you’re in the middle of the sea. But then you get your raggedy draft and you tighten it up and you polish it. A short-story writer thinks: ‘I’m in the middle of the sea, and I never had swimming lessons.’”
She has more time to write now her son is grown up. He was a talented footballer, in the US Olympic development team, and she spent hours on the sidelines, abandoning any pretence of trying to work. She is still a huge sports fan: “I sometimes watch the World Cup straight from the beginning, all kinds of teams I don’t even care about. I’m totally in it.”
She is looking forward to returning to Vanderbilt next semester. “I’m the same age as their grandmothers,” she says of her students. “I learn a lot from them.” She tells a good story about a poet they have hired to teach at the faculty, who, she discovered, had a dog called Finn. Then another friend, also a poet, called her new dog Lily after her old one died. Moore had already delivered I Am Homeless and it was too late to rename the characters. Back in Nashville, they sometimes all get together for dinner. “And there would be Finn and Lily. I was really dismayed about those dogs.”
It could almost be the start of a Lorrie Moore short story – she does good dinner parties. “If you’re paying attention, the funny stuff is there. If you’re paying attention, the sad stuff is there,” she says of her gift for making readers laugh and cry, sometimes in a single paragraph. “I think you’d be foolish to just pick one and ignore the other. If you want a full vision of life and of people you have to have both.”
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