Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
Birds of America: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)
In the first story in the collection – ‘Willing’ – we meet Sidra, who was once a vaguely famous movie star, who had been up for some kind of award once in her career. Sidra is from Chicago – but she has lived for years in LA. Her career was based on her looks – she had nude scenes, etc. – her father will never go see any of her movies because of that … but now things have dried up for Sidra. She is 40. Work isn’t coming anymore. Life is a howling wilderness. In desperation, she moves back to Chicago – and she stays in a Days Inn. For months. Sometimes she goes and visits her parents. Sometimes she goes to blues clubs with Charlotte, an old friend of hers from high school. Her best friend is a gay man named Tommy – who lives in Santa Monica – and screams at her over the phone, ‘What are you DOING?? Come back to LA!” Sidra can’t help but look at the big picture … and that’s what gets her, that’s what keeps her up nights. She is alone. She has missed the opportunity, it seems, to mate up with someone and have kids. She always thought she would have had kids. So she is disoriented by the fact that she does not. She meets a man at a jazz club – and they start a relationship, sort of. He is not aware that she was once famous, at least not at first. Sidra, though, is weird now. She doesn’t respect him, and wonders if that could change – if they could actually make a go of it. Is she still capable of having dreams like that? She’s way out of practice.
The whole story is deeply depressing … and I found myself almost looking away at certain points. Not because I was feeling bad for Sidra, but because I recognized myself in Sidra, and it makes me too sad to even get through the day. But the way Lorrie Moore writes about Sidra’s struggles made me feel … I don’t know, it’s one of those moments when a really private thought or feeling is expressed perfectly by an artist, someone you don’t know – they just NAIL it, in a song, a poem, a book, whatever … and you point at it and go, ‘Yes! That is what it is like for me!”
Courage. Lorrie Moore says things that I might be too afraid to say. And so there’s a weird comfort at times, reading a story like ‘Willing’ – even though it hits too close to home. i still read it and think, “Lorrie Moore knows. She knows what it’s like.”
Sidra, also, is doing her best. Life has not beaten her. Not yet, anyway. She still cracks stupid jokes, she makes dumb puns on words, she tries to make people laugh. She’s still in the game. Life has moved on without her, certainly … but she’s not given up yet. That’s the saddest part of all.
Here’s an excerpt.
EXCERPT FROM Birds of America: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)
He began to realize, soon, that she did not respect him. A bug could sense it. A doorknob could figure it out. She never quite took him seriously. She would talk about films and film directors, then look at him and say, “Oh, never mind.” She was part of some other world. A world she no longer liked.
And now she was somewhere else. Another world she no longer liked.
But she was willing. Willing to give it a whirl. Once in a while, though she tried not to, she asked him about children, about having children, about turning kith to kin. How did he feel about all that? It seemed to her that if she were ever going to have a life of children and lawn mowers and grass clippings, it would be best to have it with someone who was not demeaned or trivialized by discussions of them. Did he like those big fertilized lawns? How about a nice rock garden? How did he feel deep down about those combination storm windows with the built-in screens?
“Yeah, I like them all right,” he said, and she would nod slyly and drink a little too much. She would try then not to think too strenuously about her whole life. She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic – drink, don’t drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.
“I always thought someday I would have a little girl and name her after my grandmother.” Sidra sighted, peered wistfully into her sherry.
“What was your grandmother’s name?”
Sidra looked at his paisley mouth. “Grandma. Her name was Grandma.” Walter laughed in a honking sort of way. “Oh, thank you,” murmured Sidra. “Thank you for laughing.”
Walter had a subscription to AutoWeek. He flipped through it in bed. He also liked to read repair manuals for new cars, particularly the Toyotas. He knew a lot about control panels, light-up panels, side panels.
“You’re so obviously wrong for each other,” said Charlotte over tapas at a tapas bar.
“Hey, please,” said Sidra. “I think my taste’s a little subtler than that.” The thing with tapas bars was that you just kept stuffing things into your mouth. “Obviously wrong is just the beginning. That’s where I always begin. At obviously wrong.” In theory, she liked the idea of mismatched couples, the wrangling and retangling, like a comedy by Shakespeare.
“I can’t imagine you with someone like him. He’s just not special.” Charlotte had met him only once. But she had heard of him from a girlfriend of hers. He had slept around, she’d said. “Into the pudding” is how she phrased it, and there were some boring stories. “Just don’t let him humiliate you. Don’t mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness,” she added.
“I’m supposed to wait around for someone special, while every other girl in this town gets to have a life?”
“I don’t know, Sidra.”
It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed. It suggested sexual things. “I’m a very average person,” she said desperately, somehow detecting that Charlotte already knew that, knew the deep, dark, wildly obvious secret of that, and how it made Sidra slightly pathetic, unseemly – inferior, when you got right down to it. Charlotte studied Sidra’s face, headlights caught in the stare of a deer. Guns don’t kill people, thought Sidra fizzily. Deer kill people.
“Maybe it’s that we all used to envy you so much,” Charlotte said a little bitterly. “You were so talented. You got all the lead parts in the plays. You were everyone’s dream of what they wanted.”
Sidra poked around at the appetizer in front of her, gardening it like a patch of land. She was unequal to anyone’s wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime. “Envy,” said Sidra. “That’s a lot like hate, isn’t it.” But Charlotte didn’t say anything. Probably she wanted Sidra to change the subject. Sidra stuffed her mouth full of feta cheese and onions, and looked up. “Well, all I can say is, I’m glad to be back.” A piece of feta dropped from her lips.
Charlotte looked down at it and smiled. “I know what you mean,” she said. She opened her mouth wide and let all the food inside fall out onto the table.
Charlotte could be funny like that. Sidra had forgotten that about her.
I’m so glad you’re writing about this story. It’s one of my faves from that collection, too–even though a much larger amount of positive (yet equally deserved) critical attention had gone to some of the other pieces in the book. “Willing” is a deceptively simple piece, as much about Sidra’s local struggle to make sense of where she is (and where she isn’t) as it is an almost existential meditation on what it means (and takes) to live in good faith in a world where suffering, both inner and outer, is an irrevocable (and sometimes disproportionate) part of the deal. You get your cards and you play them as best you can. Or you don’t. Either way, it seems to me, especially in terms of Moore’s choice to start things with that incredible Joyce Carol Oates epigraph (“How can I live my life without committing an act with a giant pair of scissors?”…or something like that, I don’t have my copy with me), that she, Moore, is dramatizing the notion, among many others, that to possess self-respect and to be one’s truest, authentic self, one has to be able to know when to say “no”–and stick to the answer. The flipside here is that in saying “no,” you also have to know what you want to (and can) say “yes” to. And this is what I think makes Sidra’s situation so poignant: she has been saying “yes” for so long to doing things without carefully considering the effect they have on her mind and soul, that by the time she tries to change (i.e., saying “no”), she discovers possibly (and painfully) that for whatever reasons (vanity, self-hatred, fear, depression, fatigue, etc.) she doesn’t have it in her to make the kind of change that will genuinely provide the spiritual and emotional outlet she still desperately needs. Neither part of the world she’s left behind nor part of the one she claims she wants to live in, she’s left in a horrible limbo, made particularly awful by her temperamental inability to let the horror truly hit her in a way that could, if dealt with head-on, spur her toward making a more, er, psychologically salubrious set of choices. Of course, this wouldn’t mean that her various pains and sorrows would disappear, but certainly what seems to be her gnawing sense of emptiness would, I think, dissipate a bit–if not disappear altogether. It’s her emptiness, finally, that haunts me in this story. Because it’s arguably everyone’s potential or actual emptiness, especially in an spectacle-beholden culture (and not simply in the West) where brazenness is not only championed, but also more often than not mistaken for courage. (Reality T.V., anyone? Waging war in Iraq? Flying a 767 into a building to make a “religious” point?) Anyway, that’s what I, um, got out of it.
hahahaha “That’s what I ……… got out of it.”
How can I live my life without committing an act with a giant scissors?
I love what you said about her inability to face things head-on … she skips around it, or tries … but then things ambush her. Like the moment in the excerpt that gives me such a chill when she says she has to avoid thinking about her whole life … God, I know those moments. When everything seems too big, too awful, and everything – EVERYTHING – has gone wrong. The whole part about her being “willing” is interesting, and I haven’t thought enough about it. The story starts with her reminiscing about her last picture – and the shot of her naked hip – but it wasn’t even her hip, it was a body double … and there was something soulless and awful about how she was treated … but she was up for it, she was “willing”.
And now what?
Is it too late to say “yes” to things? At 40, shouldn’t you take what you can get? Compromise can be awesome, can help us out a lot as humans – to not be so dogmatic and rigid – but eventually, compromise can bite you in the ass, if you’re not in it for the right reasons …
“I’m supposed to wait around for someone special, while every other girl in this town gets to have a life?”
Ouch!!!
Right. Or maybe it’s not so much “compromise” as it is a willingness to recognize and accept that nothing or anyone is perfect. Or absolute. Least of all oneself. That doing or accepting the things at 40 that seem to suggest that one’s “lowered” former standards or expectations is actually a mature recognition of one’s limitations (most of us have from the get-go, just takes time for one to realize this and flatten out the narcissism a bit, if one’s lucky and “willing”, that would one believing otherwise), and the expression of a desire to be happy in a way that is genuinely commensurate with one’s temperament and circumstances. Ah, but to know what those are! In the story, it’s Sidra continuing unwillingness to frame her life on a scale that truly reflects her reality. She is, as she says, “a hip who knew Latin.” She is also someone who was always willing to trade on her physical beauty and sardonic sense of humor to get attention, an impulse made all the more insidious by her professionalizing of it (and in a context–i.e., the flat, body-doubled world of film–that inevitably would seduce her and others like her into near-blindness about her actual motivations and desires). By the time she extricates herself from that world, though, she has already severely compromised her ability to be happy (i.e., to live life on the scale she says is hers: “I’m an ordinary person,” she said desperately). No wonder, then, that when she’s really living back in the “ordinary” circumstances of Chicago, she can hardly bear herself or the town. No, the games’s not up for Sidra yet (Moore makes this clear by suggesting that the edgy, knowing sense of humor that informed Sidra’s talent in those few films and theatrical projects where she was or would be able, in whatever distorted and ultimately-for-her unhealthy way, to project her inner life–i.e., “Mother Courage–with make-up”–is the same sense of humor that, if she had the actual courage to use it for different purposes, would lead her to the happiness eluding her in Chicago). But the clock is ticking. And not simply her biological one. The older she gets, the more herself she becomes. And the more yourself you become, the harder it usually is to change. Question remains: what’s Sidra still willing or able to muster in order to have a self that she can live with? If anything, it’s not happiness that’s elusive but rather the genuine ability to make the kinds of changes that allow one to pursue happiness in good faith (i.e. while recognizing limitations). Those kinds of changes just get harder and harder to make as people age. But, again, Sidra’s hardly an old crone. So who knows?
//it’s Sidra continuing unwillingness to frame her life on a scale that truly reflects her reality. //
I think that’s what really hits home for me in this story. I also have hope for her. That this is the transition time. Her awkward transition into another phase, a more graceful phase.
Wow. I love this excerpt. Think I need to get some Lorrie Moore.
Tracey – she’s such a wonderful writer! You’ll love her. I think Birds of America is her best collection.
Sigh. Ok, FINE. I’m headed to the tub and I’m taking my Birds of America with me.
(And I realize now, after reading this post, that while yes, I was hesitant to read her because I’ve heard such raves and was afraid to possibly be disappointed, I was also impatient in general with short stories. You expressed very well that feeling of, “God, so what?” that I so often feel after reading one. I was pretty convinced that LM is one of the best in the field, but I was also fearful that that wasn’t saying much. So. Off I go…)
The Books: “A Winter’s Love” (Madeleine L’Engle)
Next book on my young adult fiction shelf – although this is really adult fiction – but I like to keep all of Madeleine L’Engle’s stuff together: Next book on the shelf is A Winter’s Love by Madeleine L’Engle. Okay…
Diana – yeah, she really is something else. Perfect. Minute, but also profound. Let me know what you think – I’ll be posting a couple more excerpts before moving on from her book.
I read the first story, Willing, and then came back to read what you’d written about it. I don’t think that this one will be my favorite, but it was good! And I could certainly see what you’d pointed out.
I want to say that I loved the title of the story, and the concept. That alone made me stop and stare off into space for a few moments after reading what the narrator says about her being willing. And I thought, what a great idea for a series of stories, each one a portrait of a certain character trait. Willing. Open. Grim. Judgmental.
Ok, back to the stories.
It was interesting, Sheila, to see parallels between Sidra and you. Actresses, Chicago, the same age-ish. (And I don’t even know you! Isn’t blogging the weirdest thing?!) I think that’s why this story didn’t grab me as much as it seems to have you, but upon further reflection, I could see a lot of parallels in my own life, too. They’re just not as obvious.
I could TOTALLY relate to her passivity, or “willingness.” Her life sort of happened to her and she’s in a daze, wondering what’s happened. Just as she finds herself with a career behind her but no marriage/children, it’s possible (ahem) to have the mirror image of that happen where you wake up to find the husband and kids but no professional accomplishments and no idea where to start. So she speaks to the state of regret, IMO. I felt that deeply as I was reading.
I found myself wanting to know more about her. I’d think that Moore hadn’t given enough details, for example, what Sidra’s growing-up had been like, and then I’d realize that she had, in her descriptions of her parents.
Then I wondered what she was like as a young adult, I mean, how did this passive, numb person end up an actress? And then I realized that when her old friend wistfully describes the envy they’d all felt of her in high school – again, all there. So it’s like, the story was actually more complex, the more I thought about it, than I’d initially given it credit for.
This is fun! I’ll read more and check back tomorrow. :)
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