Self-Help

Lorrie Moore’s Self Help is such a great leap in time in comparison to the other texts that it can be difficult to isolate points of comparison. Moore’s collection focuses on different themes, including disease and fractured relationships, and the psyche. I find in all of Moore’s stories in this collection, there is a profound sadness in many of her stories that is tempered by the quirkiness and humor of her characters. Being exposed to Moore’s work (“How To Be A Writer,” “People Like That Are The Only People Here”), what I’ve noted was her use of humor to discuss very dark topics, such as pediatric cancer. To answer the question of whether or not her stories are funny or sad, I’d definitely say “both,” but maybe I’d give sadness slightly more priority, especially in the case of a story such as “To Fill,” where Riva is attempting so desperately to appear put together, but reaches a breaking point.

In terms of Self-Help being a short story cycle, it’d be much easier to say, “the How-to” stories are the organizing principle, but not every story is a how-to story or necessarily mocking that paradigm. The narrators are all female and in troubled relationships, many have a parent who is ill in some way, and I’d say the tragicomic tone that pervades the stories serve as organizing principles in this short story cycles. Of course, we also do have the How-to stories, but I feel these stories, too, become about these larger themes Moore presents throughout the work and do not simply exist to mock that genre.

I think the specificity of Moore’s details are what I’d most like to emulate in my short story cycle (I also think this specificity, even in the How-to stories, is what prevents these women from sounding exactly the same – although it could definitely be argued that they’re meant to represent a collective rather than a individual voice). I recently workshopped the first twenty pages of my short novel and the thing that stuck out the most to me (it was also a comment noted when this draft was four pages long and being workshopped in Fiction II) was that my characters had a “floating in space” quality – readers had no way to deduce where they were, what they looked like, their ethnicity, etc…and I feel this is very tied to my lack of imagination throughout my lifetime regarding clothing, interior design, food, and other areas of life and craft where one can be creative. In other words, even though it was really clunky and terrible, I went from describing characters as “She was wearing a sparkly-straps tank top” to completely jettisoning any mention of clothing/food/surroundings/etc. Moore’s writing, on the other hand, is so precise – I get a very clear sense of her characters and how and why they use humor and sarcasm as a coping mechanism. I need to use the same level of detail if my characters are to be comprehensible to readers in any real way.