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January 16, 2009

I spoke to Lorrie Moore when her Collected Stories came out in hardback. Moore lives and writes in Wisconsin, where she holds the Delmore Schwartz Professorship in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her new novel will be published in the autumn.

Erica Wagner: What's it like to see all these stories collected together?

Lorrie Moore: I don't know who would actually sit down and do that, read them all the way through like that; I had to because I had to proofread the book [she's laughing here], but by the end I had my head in my hands. You feel distant, and you wouldn't write these particular stories now, especially some of them, and even if you did you would write them differently. And you think the words are stupid and ask why did I write it this way? Sometimes there's a pleasant surprise - right next to something that's mortifying. But everybody has that about their younger work. Except Hemingway, maybe. But maybe he even felt that way.

What do you think about readers who look at your work for clues to your own life?

It's a way of reading that has always existed. I try not to judge it; as writers we don't like it, we have a knee-jerk response, we want to set it aside. But there are ways of seeing it as a compliment, there are ways of understanding it as just natural human curiosity. I think fiction writers somehow feel disrespected by it, that it shows no comprehension of what fiction's doing or what literature is, but it's always been there. If it's a problem, it's always been a problem. It's always been in the conversation. So much so that now there's this rash of memoir-writing. People who would ordinarily take a manuscript and call it an autobiographical novel are calling it a memoir, and there's confusion - as with James Frey and Oprah [Winfrey]. Because Frey really did try to sell A Million Little Pieces as a novel, and he couldn't.

You know, almost all novels are autobiographical to some extent, that doesn't mean they're not novels. There's always been a biographical strain in lit crit. Whether it's analysis or a lit biog; it's just there. I try not to think it's absolutely philistine to think that way, because we all do. We're all curious about people's lives beyond the book and all of that. But it shouldn't be the main thing, it shouldn't be distracting. But I think it's a natural thing. Even if it's not ... attractive.

Is it a harder climate for fiction these days?

I'm not a climatologist. I don't really know what the climate is. Everybody's trying to take the cultural temperature, but what do they know? Writers are just home writing books, so we're the last ones to know - and if we did know, it would probably paralyse us.

Do you think the short story is in trouble?

But Jhumpa Lahiri's been at No 1 in the bestseller lists with Unaccustomed Earth, a book of stories - which is great! The downside is that shows that not very much is selling; the upside is that it's absolutely unprecedented, never before has a young woman's collection of short stories been No 1. So that's very exciting, and I try to get my students excited about it. They are so apprehensive about their own future that sometimes instead of taking inspiration from other people's success they feel that there's only a little success out there so if someone else has it, they won't. And they're close enough to her age to feel, almost, that she got all the success. Instead of feeling inspired by it.

What do you for recreation?

I don't do anything. I grocery shop. I go to the grocery store, get groceries, come back and say, Oh! I had my break. You know how it is.

Thanks to Faber & Faber, we have ten copies of Birds of America by Lorrie Moore to give away to the first ten readers to e-mail books@thetimes.co.uk. Include your name and address.

January 3, 2009

Alyson Rudd on Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

HOW CAN A STORY end in a restaurant with a husband looking at the spine of his wife and her bright, new and terrible hair as she bends over at the table? What does that mean? Lorrie Moore does that to you, she makes you want to scream at the page.

If you do not much like tales with no endings then this collection of short stories might drive you crazy. However, how wonderful it is to be left hungry for more every 20 pages. I could not manage to read more than three stories without a break. I needed to pause, digest and accept that I would never know more about Agnes or Joe and that I did not need to know more. You have to trust that Moore has given you all the detail you need.

And it is splendid detail. There are snippets of conversation and thoughts and although we have been in a character's company a matter of minutes, Moore shows us enough for us to sense the irony or humour or pain. There is plenty of pain, much of it the mundane sort.

The book is packed with women who feel unfulfilled or are hurt by a glance in their direction. Women do all the talking; their men grunt or try to say the right thing and fail. The father of an actress was so horrified to see his daughter naked on screen that he now leaves for a nap whenever she visits. One woman, a dance instructor, likes people who talk not with their hands, not with their arms but who talk with their arms over their head. This collection is the writing equivalent. It is bold and slightly bonkers but also witty, fascinating and mesmeric.

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
Faber & Faber, £8.99; 291pp Buy the book

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