{"id":7903,"date":"2008-03-27T07:04:37","date_gmt":"2008-03-27T11:04:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=7903"},"modified":"2015-05-08T08:09:50","modified_gmt":"2015-05-08T12:09:50","slug":"the-books-birds-of-america-willing-lorrie-moore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=7903","title":{"rendered":"The Books: \u201cBirds of America\u201d \u2013 \u2018Willing\u2019 (Lorrie Moore)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:<\/p>\n

\"birds_of_america.jpg\" <\/p>\n

Birds of America: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)<\/a>\"\", by Lorrie Moore. With Birds of America<\/i>, published in 1998, Lorrie Moore hit the jackpot. That book was everywhere you looked. It was on the NY Times<\/i> bestseller list. Self-Help<\/i> and Like Life<\/i> were fine books – but in Birds of America<\/i>, Lorrie Moore hit her stride. These stories are beyond compare. If you’ve read the book, you know what I mean. I don’t read a ton of short stories – I have to really be into an author to pick up a book of short stories … I like Joyce’s short stories. I like Hemingway’s. I like Annie Proulx’s short stories, and I like Margaret Atwood’s short stories. I love AS Byatt’s short stories. And when I read Birds of America<\/i> (the first of Moore’s books I read), I realized I was reading something where I needed superlatives in order to describe it. It’s HARD to be “good” at short stories. I mean, how many boring self-indulgent pretentious or kitchen-sink-to-the-point-of-apathy stories have we all read? There’s a certain style in American short stories right now, and I can’t stand it. I find many of them unreadable. It’s not just that they’re about minutia – that’s fine, Lorrie Moore’s stories in many ways are about the tiniest of moments … it’s that the writing itself is lackluster, and nothing pops off the page. Recently, the Willesden Herald famously held a short story contest – and then DIDN’T pick any of the entries and said, “Try again next year.” So there will be no winner. It was a huge deal, and everyone was babbling about it. Zadie Smith was one of the judges. It was a huge deal. People went apeshit – but basically the Willesden Herald’s point was: “None of the stories sent in were good enough. Sorry.” One of the editors came out with a fantastic list called 27 reasons why short stories are rejected<\/a> – a list I have printed out for future reference. I really recognized many of my own mistakes in that list – things I have either worked to improve, OR am not even aware that I do. But now I am. Anyway, all of this is to say: it’s hard to write a good short story. If you’re going to write short stories, KNOW that it’s hard, and get to know your form. Learn it. Each story in Birds of America<\/i> is not only a specific three-dimensional world – with food and music and drinks and weather – but an expansive look at a slice of human experience. And again, I am not quite sure how Lorrie Moore does it – but it seems to me (and I’ve said this before) that it has to do with courage. Lorrie Moore strikes me as a pretty fearless writer. She keeps you in the trivial, and then – with one fell swoop – pulls back the curtain and makes some grand statement that rips your heart out. I suppose, too, that there is something in her characters that really resonate with me. They are doing their best. But something, somewhere, went wrong along the way. And if they could only retrace their steps … Lorrie Moore just knows how to write about experiences like that, without being maudlin, or dramatic. She just GETS it. Those moments at 3 am where you suddenly sit up in bed, look around, and wonder: “Where the hell am I? Whose life is this?” Horrible moments. Horrible bleak moments surrounded by the banal business of trying to survive, trying to keep your spirits up. Lorrie Moore’s stories are always quite funny, even if they sucker-punch you from time to time.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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!”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt.<\/p>\n


\nEXCERPT FROM Birds of America: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)<\/a>\"\", by Lorrie Moore. Excerpt from story ‘Willing’<\/b><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And now she was somewhere else. Another world she no longer liked.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

“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<\/i>. She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic – drink, don’t drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.<\/p>\n

“I always thought someday I would have a little girl and name her after my grandmother.” Sidra sighted, peered wistfully into her sherry.<\/p>\n

“What was your grandmother’s name?”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

Walter had a subscription to AutoWeek<\/i>. 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.<\/p>\n

“You’re so obviously wrong for each other,” said Charlotte over tapas at a tapas bar.<\/p>\n

“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<\/i> begin. At obviously wrong.” In theory, she liked the idea of mismatched couples, the wrangling and retangling, like a comedy by Shakespeare.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

“I’m supposed to wait around for someone special, while every other girl in this town gets to have a life?”<\/p>\n

“I don’t know, Sidra.”<\/p>\n

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<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\n

“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<\/i> wanted.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Charlotte could be funny like that. Sidra had forgotten that about her.<\/p>\n

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