Who is Lorrie Moore?

You walk out of class dismayed about the content you are reading. You walk to the vending machine, pop a Diet Pepsi out of hole at the bottom of it, and wonder how anyone can see what you are reading is anything but depressing.

But, what you are reading is about life, what you are reading is Self-Help, the breakout novel by Lorrie Moore, and not everything in life is make-your-ribs-ache hilarious. By writing both introspectively and to the point, Moore allows us to look at real human tragedy, and by acutely using clever instances of humor, she allows us to analyze these sorrows without having a terrible day ourselves.

Moore is a perfect example of how an author can be considered comic, but not always write comedies. Yet to understand how a storyteller can write so well about the lives of others, one must first look at the history of the author.

Moore’s Early Life

Marie Lorena Moore, also known as Lorrie Moore, was born in 1957 in Glen Falls, New York. The second of four children, Moore was embraced by a household that placed high emphasis on literature and the arts. As a child, Moore loved the arts; ballet, painting, singing, and playing the piano. It wasn’t until Moore starting taking creative writing classes in high school and college that she wrote her first of many prize-winning pieces. “Raspberries,” was the winner of the 1974 Seventeen Magazine’s fiction contest, and opened the door for Lorrie to receive a scholarship to St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. Moore, who has been described as very intelligent, graduated Summa Cum Laude from St. Lawrence in 1978 and went on to pursue a Master of Fine Arts at Cornell University in New York. It was her academic advisor at Cornell, Allison Lurie, who encouraged Moore to submit several of the short stories from her master thesis for publication. Six of the short stories, along with others, were published in 1985 entitled Self-Help.

From The Uses of Humor

Moore’s Work

In Self-Help, Moore writes about sex, loneliness, and isolation but she does it with a concise, underlying tone of humor. Her stories in Self-Help are not to be read literally, but more to be savored and digested. The feelings that are inevitable to ensue are what Moore was aiming for: she writes to conveys feelings, not just anecdotes. The reader can then either choose to be sad all day, or to relate and learn from the emotional strife that was written about. Precise use of humor provides just enough comic relief to keep the reader from becoming too morose. Along with Self-Help, Moore has two other collections of short stories. The first, entitled Life Like, was published in 1990. Birds of America was the collection that landed her on the New York Times’ bestsellers list, and was published in 1998. Birds of America deals with more short stories about alienation, tragedy, love, and depression. As a reader, it is difficult to find humor in stories where your dog dies, you find out you have cancer, or even commit suicide. That is the beauty of Moore’s comedic writing, you can find comedy in the smallest places. It is all in Moore’s details.

Although known most for her short stories, Lorrie Moore has also written a few acclaimed novels. A year after she published Self-Help, she composed a comedic novel entitled Anagrams. Unlike some of her more premiere works, this truly is a comedic novel, not a deep book with spots of comic relief. In 1995 Moore published her only other novel to date, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?. It has been said in a review by Caryn James that, “Though her early works were clever and often piercing, the stories in Ms. Moore's 1990 collection, Like Life, were deeper and far more resonant. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is her richest work yet; here she is not afraid to let the darkness emerge from beneath her jokes.”




Awards and Jobs
In 1998 Moore won the O.Henry Award for a short story entitled People Like That Are The Only People Here. Along with the O.Henry Award, Moore also was awarded the Rea Award in 2004 for outstanding achievements in short stories. Currently, Moore is a creative writing teacher at the University of Wisconsin.

From The Uses of Humor

In Conclusion...
With a background deeply rooted in self-expression, and with the help of various educational institutions and a few key mentors, Lorrie Moore has become a testament to the talent of female fiction authors/humorists. Moore's stories are the type that tear your heart apart like pieces of construction paper, then through humor and contemplation by the reader, those pieces are resurrected back into a beautiful piece of art. Hence humor, while not being entirely overt, plays a pivotal role in her communication with her audience. As readers, we must remember that there are a million different shades of blue. Moore shows us that there are also a million different ways to feel down, and a million ways to be sad and alone. Most amazingly, she also shows us that we can conquer the highest degrees of adversity life by looking for humor and irony in our most trying times.

Work Cited:
James, Caryn. “I Feel His Lack of Love for me” The New York Times on the Web. 9 October. 1994. Available http://www.times.com/books/98/09/20/specials/moore-frog.html.

Lister, Rachel. "Lorrie Moore." The Literary Encyclopedia. 9. February 2006. Available http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11691

“Moore, Lorrie.” Wikipedia. 2 October. 2008 Available http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorrie_Moore.

“Moore, Lorrie.” 2 .October, 2008. Available http://www.wisc.edu/english/faculty/moore.html

"Moore, Lorrie: Introduction." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 165. Gale Cengage, 2003. eNotes.com. 2006. 2 Oct, 2008

Phelan, James. "'Self-Help' for narratee and narrative audience: how "I" - and "You"? - read "How." - Lorrie Moore's short story 'How' from the collection 'Self-Help' - Second-Person Narrative". Style. FindArticles.com. 02 Oct. 2008. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_n3_v28/ai_16988704