I hear Miranda July compared to Lorrie Moore, but from what little I've read of July, I think I'd rather get drunk with Moore's characters. I like depressed funny people, and Moore's characters seem like they can throw a punch too.

the big reveal (imaginary daughter and friend) was rather spoiled by the blurb on the back. I enjoyed the character of Benna, but was not heavily invested in her dramas.

Humerus and clever in a weigh shared by the wit and creativity of pun. My funny bone was tickled yet simultaneously pained.

This is an innovative and exciting way to tell a story, or more specifically a series of short stories: by creating anagrams out of the same two people's lives, Lorrie Moore tinkers with all the possible ways a relationship, career, and life trajectory can play out, through tones of disappointment, longing, happiness, or boredom - all presented in the same vessels that are Benna and Gerard. Plus, it's all delivered in Moore's prose, which is possibly the best prose out there. The only problem is that, after zipping through several great iterations of these characters' lives, Moore suddenly hunkers down with the characters for a 120 page novella, and it happens to be the most boring iteration in the whole set: Gerard is a failed lounge singer, and Benna is a miserable, bored, and boring community college teacher. This whole final section was a real slog. Oh well. I'll be reading other Moore regardless, because I can't resist more of that gorgeous, funny, true writing.

This is the first book I've read by this author, having picked it up by chance at the bookstore. Lorrie Moore has a true gift for language and words; I love the way she plays with meaning and pronunciation and her descriptions are spot on. Her writing is humorous but also very human and I appreciate her take on life and love.

Highly recommended!

One of our best living writers. Been a long time since a book has moved me this much.

Lines that make me love her:

“ . . . [R]ealizing that faced with the large questions of life and not finding large answers, one must then settle for makeshift, little answers, just as on any given day a person must at least eat something, even if it was not marvelous and huge.” (4)

“Once you’ve seen a child born you realize a baby’s not much more than a reconstituted ham and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you and what you’ve been eating for nine months.” (6-7)

“This is why I was pleased: The lump was not simply a focal point for my self-pity; it was also a battery propelling me, strengthening me—my very own appointment with death. It anchored and deepened me like a secret. I started to feel it when I walked, just out from under my armpit—hardy , achy evidence that I was truly a knotted saint, a bleeding angel. At last it had been confirmed: My life was really as difficult as I had always suspected.” (10)

“It is so like Gerard. That man lives across from the hall from his own fucking heart.”
(11-12)

“There was this to be said for the sedatives: They helped you adjust to death better. It was difficult to pick up and move anywhere, let alone from life to death, without the necessary psychic equipment. That was why, I realized, persons in messy, unhappy situations had trouble getting out: Their strength ebbed; they simultaneously aged and regressed; they had no sedatives. They didn’t know who they were, though they suspected they were the browning, on-sale hamburger of the parallel universe. Frightened of their own toes, they needed the bravery of sedatives. Which could make the look generously upon the skinny scrap of their life and deem it good, ensuring a calmer death. It was, after all, easier to leave something you truly, serenely loved than something you really and frantically didn’t quite. A good dying was a matter of the right attitude. A healthy death, like anything—hob promotions or looking younger—was simply a matter of ‘feeling good about yourself.’ Which is where the sedatives came in. Sedate as a mint, a woman could place a happy hand on the shoulder of death and rasp out, ‘Waddya say, buddy, wanna dance?’ Also, you could get chores done. You could get groceries bought. You could do laundry and fold.” (12-13)

“It’s not that men fear intimacy. It’s that they’re hypochondriacs of intimacy: They always think they have it when they don’t. Gerard thinks we’re very close but half the time he’s talking to me like he met me forty-five minutes ago, telling me things about himself I’ve known for years, and asking me questions about myself that he should know the answers to already. Last night he asked me what my middle name was.” (20)

“I felt we’d gotten to know each other too well, or rather, brought to the stubborn limits of our knowability, we were now left with the jagged scrape of our differences, our unknowability laid glisteningly bare.” (26)

“[H]e wanted the anonymity and freedom to wander purchaseless from island to island. I could not be enough of the world for him. A woman could never be enough of the world, I thought, though that was what a man desired of her, though she flap her arms frantically trying.” (34)

“I stopped taking sedatives. The days were all false, warm-gray. Monoxide days. Dirty bathmat. Shoe sole. When I went downtown all the stores bled together like wet magazines.” (37)

“But I believed in starting over. There was, finally, I knew, only rupture and hurt and falling short between all persons, but, Shirley, the best revenge was to turn your life into a small gathering of miracles. If I could not be anchored and profound, I would try, at least, to be kind.” (39)

“The problem with a beautiful woman is that she makes everyone around her feel hopelessly masculine, which if you’re already male to begin with poses no particular problem. But if you’re anyone else, your whole sexual identity gets dragged into the principal’s office: ‘So what’s this I hear about you prancing around, masquerading as a woman?’ You are answerless. You are sitting on your hands. You are praying for your breasts to grow, your hair to perk up.” (48)

“Then in August, she packed up her car and drove out here alone, feeling like a map folded back against its creases.” (57)

“We were sitting in Hank’s, a favorite junk coffee shop downtown, a place where I join him almost daily in ceremoniously sending month-old grease, cigarette smoke, and mind-blitzing coffee in the direction of vital organs.” (68)

“People didn’t get married because they had found someone. It wasn’t a treasure hunt. It was more like musical chairs: Wherever you were when the music of being single stopped, that’s where you sat.” (74)

“She looked around the classroom. Twenty faces with the personalities of cheeses and dial tones . . . They looked inert, frozen as fish sticks . . . the huge cryogenic experiment that was the class.” (82)

“ . . . I am the same person, the same identical awareness, the fame fuzzball of mind, the same muck of nerves, all along the line. I forage through my life everywhere—there, there, and there—it is only me in it, the very same me, the same harmless lump, the same soggy weirdo, the same sleeping, breathing bun.” (104)

“God is dead, and denied the last word on things, is acting like a real baby.” (110)

“From the backyard I am taking in the evening: The trees on the horizon release the moon, upward, the electric egg of the moon in a slow ovulation across the sky, lone as a diamond, as one bad eye roaming.” (134)

“This is like every divorce. You get tears in your eyes and think, ‘God, all that oral sex and now we’re talking to each other like bureaucrats.’” (186)

“Perhaps, she was thinking, there was nothing in which anyone might intelligently place their faith. Perhaps, there was only rubble and sleep.” (224)

Another brilliant piece of work by Lorrie Moore. I think this one is my favorite (so far) and that is saying a lot.

"She looked pink and beseeching, though essentially she looked the same, as people do despite the fact they have begun to turn into monsters and are about to tell you something that should require horns or fangs or vaulted eyebrows but never apparently does."

Exactly! "Exactly!" is what I tend to yell a lot while reading Lorrie's words. She's like a spy inside my head and soul.