By Kevin Foley Article published November 20, 2002
Standing before the stained glass of the John Dewey Lounge, Lorrie Moore appears as skittish and smart as one of the narrators of one of her acclaimed short stories. The author of Birds of America and Like Life spoke and read on Nov. 14 in a visit arranged by English Professor David Huddle for the Buckham Writer's Workshop.
Moore writes fluidly and, seemingly, personally — many of her readers, for example, apparently know that she dropped and killed a baby at a picnic (an episode from a story Moore said she couldn't write now that she is a mother) and endured dozens of doomed and bizarre love affairs. She discussed this and other perils of the writing life in an hour-long conversation with her UVM audience, then segued into a reading with material drawn from her new novel and an older short story.
The conversation often touched on the tendency of a writer's audience to confuse art for life, tilting heavily to the life. It's a syndrome Moore is a little sensitive about, particularly since The New Yorker ran a photo of her next to a short story about a mother with a severely ill child, subverting the piece's artfulness into autobiography (Moore's child had been sick, but the story was fiction; more on it later). And, it turned out, the conversation brought up something else she's a bit sensitive about: she had hoped to turn in a draft for her new novel in September, but she won't finish it until next year. Given this, the first question of her UVM reading was, inevitably, "So when's the new book coming out?"
"Oh," she said, more gently and ruefully than the words on the screen will convey, "it's the writing police."
A writer's despairing question
The art is going slowly in part because of… life. Moore is an English professor at the University of Wisconsin and she has a young son. And, although she has published two novels, she also admits to having a somewhat cranky relationship with the form.
"I think of myself as a short-story writer," she said. "It's a form that resembles a song for me. You can internalize its shape… A novel, which must be read at many sittings, can't be internalized... Writing a novel, to me, is like a job."
And Moore, of course, already has a job. But she's "trying to appreciate" the job-ness of writing the novel, a process that her UVM audience is likely hoping goes well: she read a 15-minute portion of the work in progress that ended at an intriguing juncture — from the collective gasp when she stopped, it was clear her admirers are ready for more. Moore made light of the unfinished book (with six books published before she turned 40, she's not exactly a slacker), comparing her plight favorably with that of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, but during one exchange, she put her plight into a larger and sadder context.
"I recently asked a friend rather despairingly, 'Was there ever a major American writer who was mother to a young child and who worked full-time?' We couldn't think of any. Plenty of men, no women," she said.
"Helpless before the material"
Critics often praise Moore for how deftly her work mingles tragedy and humor. Her characters crack jokes in the midst of darkness; they shift from humor to hysteria in offbeat and unpredictable ways that feel like life, only cleverer. When asked by the UVM audience whether this trait reflected her own personality and verbal dexterity, Moore demurred.
"I feel like I'm revealing how people really talk to each other — maybe I'm delusional, or maybe I'm lucky to know some really funny people," she said. "I've never been at a dinner party where every single person didn't at lest try to be funny. And most people succeed. Humor is just how human beings relate to each other. It is the talk you make when you are getting off the floor, the language of recovery."
Moore, like any writer, draws more than language from her life. But again and again in her talk, she emphasized how art transforms the author's experience into something different, something larger. She spent a little time talking about her experience with The New Yorker, when the magazine's layout and publicity effectively transformed a personal work of fiction, "People Like That Are the Only People Here" (compiled in Birds of America) into an autobiographical essay. An audience member pressed her on the point, observing that story built tension by itself flirting with this line through meta-commentary, as its writer-and-mother protagonist lived through, and simultaneously struggled to write about, her child's illness.
Moore largely rejected that notion. "Fiction that comments on itself is still fiction," she said.
"If you write fiction strong and well," she added," people are going to think it happened to you."
But, she allowed, perhaps sometimes, in some small sense, it did.
"I've been writing my whole adult life, and at some point you are helpless before your material. You can only write what is on your mind," she said.
