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Pick up this book. Worry that people who see you on your lunch break will think you're actually reading a self help book. Become instantly enamoured with the first story, How to be an Other Woman. Understand completely why David Sedaris drops everything for Lorrie Moore like a giggling fan-boy. Wish you'd written these stories first.Cry at the second story, What is Seized. Be reminded of Billy Collins' poem "The Lanyard", except without the humour. Listen to Billy Collins read "The Lanyard" for
The blurbs and reviews on this one praised its author's sense of humor and great writing style, but I should've paid more attention to the mentions of her ability to pick out the poignant, heartbreaking moments we all share--apparently, that means parents' divorce, bad relationships, and general inability to make good choices. Yes, she's very good at description, and can turn a nice phrase. "How to Be an Other Woman" caught me with evocative imagery and a cynical but true take on what it's like
I can't remember which of her books it is, I think it's this one, in which a character observes: "This Danish is too Sweetish for me to Finnish!"If you don't like that, you probably wouldn't like Lorrie Moore much.And if you don't like Lorrie Moore, I probably wouldn't really like you.
“Meet in expensive raincoats, on a pea-soupy night.” So begins the first story of Lorrie Moore’s first book, most of which she wrote as an M.F.A. student at Cornell University. Eight words, none of which would tax the vocabulary of a fifth-grader, and yet all of the signature elements that Moore built her award-winning career on are there: the fledgling attempts at urbanity so fragile they must be spelled out (“expensive raincoats”), the perfectly failed eloquence (“pea-soupy”), and the self-
SIX WORD REVIEW: To think, she was twenty five.
BA from Lawrence CollegeMFA from Cornell UniversityAt the time of this book she was probably an Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1976 she was awarded first prize in the Seventeen magazine short story contest (she was ~19 at the time). In review of two books of hers including Self-Help Vince Passaro says this in Harper's (August 1999): Two particular features...make her stories fundamentally different from the mainstream books of short fiction then being published: her c...
Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help was a pleasant surprise. This collection of short stories is excellent, the writing crisp and wry. I often don’t love short stories, unless they serve together to create a whole. In a collection of stand-alones, I’m lucky if there’s a single stand out that stays with me throughout the years. In this group I only found one or two that I didn’t fully enjoy. I suppose there is a feeling of connectedness between the pieces here, they do feel they emerge from the same life, t...
This book is so beautiful I can't even stand it.Choice quotes:"Cold men destroy women," my mother wrote me years later. "They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes--you hea...
You pick up Lorrie Moore’s collection of short stories called Self-Help because you’ve always admired her writing. Plus, your own writing is often compared to hers. Not because you are a master of the form, like Moore, but more because your short stories are peppered with a sort of sad and self-deprecating humor.What you love about reading short story collections over short story anthologies is that you can pick up the threads that move throughout the stories. Moore has a thing for opera singers...
This is not your usual short story collection, beginning with the prose style chosen in several of the stories (use of imperative sentences). While effective at creating an interesting narrative, the result was a group of stories that kept me at an emotional distance. If you like to sink your teeth and heart into characters, this might not be a style that appeals to you. The stories using a more traditional style were more enjoyable to me.That said, the stories did offer much food for thought an...
This was my first Lorrie Moore collection, and I really truly enjoyed it. However, I wasn't expecting the stories to be so brutally depressing - although there was a great amount of tongue-in-cheek humour throughout the collection (Moore has a truly biting wit), the subjects of the stories in question are not ideal for picking up if you are in a tired or low headspace.Moore's writing is jaunty and staccato, her prose biting, and she covers a myriad of topics in this collection - everything from
This book was a lyrical masterpiece of interconnecting words, meanings, and emotions. It was the cat's pajamas--that is, if the cat had just broken up with her boyfriend and stayed at home watching old Ingrid Bergman movies, getting over it by darkly observing the world and making the saddest jokes a cat will ever meow. That is an example of an overextended metaphor and is not that accurate in describing the amazing, heartbreaking soulfulness that is this book.It's funny, sad, dark, and upliftin...
I discovered Lorrie Moore only recently in fact, but I'm certain the timing is just right, any younger I wouldn't have really 'got' her. It's like reading Scott Adams' God's Debris when you're sixteen, or something comparable to that. I discovered Lorrie Moore while listening to the audio book of The Best American Short Stories Of The Century edited by John Updike. She was reading her story, You're Ugly Too. I was immediately sold. Now comes the hard part: I'm not so good at reviewing books that...
Empathetic and clever, Self-Help muses about broken pasts and turbulent presents. In her 1985 debut short story collection Moore lends a compelling voice to the frustrations and hopes of an eclectic bunch of women living in New York. Common themes (divorce, illness, affairs, motherhood) link together the nine tales, which collectively draw an impressionistic sketch of bourgeois life in the city on the eve of Manhattan's rapid gentrification. Favorites include "How to Be an Other Woman," "Go Like...
Every single short story I wrote in my undergrad creative writing workshops was a ripoff of Lorrie Moore in some way. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Lorrie Moore has a talent with words and poetic images, but the stories in this collection were so depressing. I only loved the first one, about the woman who becomes a mistress, I found it beautifully done and deserving a high rating, but the others weren’t my cup of tea. My 2 stars rating is the inadequate but necessary average.
This is Lorrie Moore’s first book, a collection of stories that are wise and darkly funny – but the kind of funny that hides genuine pain and heartbreak.Several of them are told in the second person and satirize the genre suggested by the title: “How to Be an Other Woman,” “How to Become a Writer” (both brilliant) and “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes).” One story is simply called “How.” Moore deals with affairs, divorce, cancer. There’s a poignant story that’s a snapshot of life from the point...
Years ago I read Lorrie Moore's excellent Who Will Run the Frog Hospital for a grad school class (on memoirs?) and I have been a fan ever since. Every so often I will run across one of her essays or stories and find myself in stitches, although her humor almost always comes with a healthy dose of irony or solemnity to keep it from being a pure laugh fest. This semester I began my Creative Writing course with an out loud, round-the-class, reading of an essay (which turns out to be from Self-Help)...
With much respect for Moore's compelling writing, I have found these stories difficult. I guess I am psychologically too vulnerable.
I first read Self-Help back when I was 20 and it didn't make much of an impression on me. Over the years I've always chalked that up to the fact that I was kind of an idiot back then, but as I got older I couldn't test that theory because I had lent my copy to someone and she never gave it back (don't you hate that?). After a couple of GR friends gave this positive reviews last year, I decided to get a new copy and try again. And, you know, I still wasn't as wowed as I thought I would be. "How t...