The Books: “Self-Help” – ‘What Is Seized’ (Lorrie Moore)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt – on my adult fiction shelves:

Self-Help by Lorrie Moore – a short story collection. Excerpt from the second story: ‘What Is Seized’.

A story told in fragments. It’s very very sad. The character development that Lorrie Moore is able to accomplish in 10 pages is extraordinary. There is no straight narrative. The device is – a woman (the narrator) looks through the scrapbooks her mother kept, after her mother has died. She takes out pictures, and describes each one – the way she describes them tells everything you need to know. But they are just fragments. It is left to us to put it all together. Stories emerge, and then subside, to give way to other stories – it is just how it feels when you look thru an old photo album, and memories rush at you, clamoring for your attention. The parents did not have a happy marriage. The father (James) was a star in the local community theatre – and he always had affairs with his female co-star. The mother wanted to be a ballerina. She was eccentric – gentle, passive-aggressive, and very sensitive. Things hit her hard. She was convinced that her husband was “a cold man” – it was her never-ending theme, how cold he was. That was her experience of him. She talked about it a lot to her kids, who didn’t experience him as cold – he was just Dad. But of course a wife will have a different perspective. I just think Lorrie Moore’s writing is extraordinary. She’s an object lesson – in how to do as little as possible, keep it bare bones, don’t expound, don’t talk too much – just say what you need to say in as few words as possible. I read stories like “What Was Seized” and it’s almost like it provides guideposts for writers. She should be studied by anyone interested in writing fiction. She’s that good.

Here’s an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Self-Help by Lorrie Moore – a short story collection. Excerpt from the second story: ‘What Is Seized’.

In the wedding photos they wear white against the murky dark of trees. They are thin and elegant. They have placid smiles. The mouth of the father of the bride remains in a short, straight line. I don’t know who took these pictures. I suppose they are lies of sorts, revealing by omission, by indirection, by clues such as shoes and clouds. But they tell a truth, the only way lies can. The way only lies can.

Another morning, I heard my parents up early in the bathroom, my dad shaving, getting ready to leave for school.

“Look,” he said in a loud whisper. “I really can’t say that I’ll never leave you and the kids or that I’ll never make love to another woman–”

“Why not?” asked my mother. “Why can’t you say that?” Even her anger was gentle, ingenuous.

“Because I don’t feel that way.”

“But … can’t you just say it anyway?”

At this I like to imagine that my parents met each other’s gaze in the medicine cabinet mirror, suddenly grinning. But later in the hospital bed, holding my hand and touching each of my nails slowly with her index finger, my mother said to me, “Your father. He was in a dance. And he just couldn’t dance.” Earlier that year she had written me: “That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls – we all have a bit of that – but that they insist their every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.”

These are the things one takes from mothers. Once they die, of course, you get the strand of pearls, the blue quilt, some of the original wedding gifts – a tray shellacked with the invitation, an old rusted toaster – but the touches and the words and the moaning the night she dies, these are what you seize, save, carry around in little invisible envelopes, opening them up quickly, like a carnival huckster, giving the world a peek. They will not stay quiet. No matter how you try. No matter how you lick them. The envelopes will not stay glued.