The stories of Lorrie Moore stay in your mind long after you read them. They linger and reverberate, like a sound you’d like to hear over and over again. This is in part due to her striking characters and memorable narratives, but also the musical intelligence of her prose, attuned to tone and timing.
Moore has written several short story collections, Self-Help (1985), Like Life (1990), Birds of America (1998), and Bark (2014), and four novels, Anagrams (1986), Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), A Gate at the Stairs (2009), and I am Homeless if This Is Not My Home (2023). A collection of her essays and reviews, See What Can Be Done, was published in 2018 by Knopf. She has won several literary awards, like The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, the O. Henry Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction. Some of her other honors include receiving a National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, a Lannan Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. She is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
In this interview, we discuss Moore’s most recent novel, I am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, the sound of stories, Nabokov, and revision. The interview was conducted over email immediately following Moore’s visit to the University of Michigan and has been edited for concision and clarity.
Priya Pai: In your latest novel, I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, you do so much with temporality and form. The book moves between a 19th-century correspondence and a road trip in the present day. I’m wondering why you chose to put those specific time periods in conversation with each other. Was it rooted in the characters, Libby and Finn, or something else?
Lorrie Moore: I was interested in both these time periods as reckoning with national division. Also, within Libby’s boarding house, one of Finn’s conspiracy theories is being enacted (perhaps, sort of). And, of course, the most obvious thing Finn and Libby have in common is the mourning of a sibling—their grief over which they return to in their thoughts and with Libby in literal letters that she keeps as a kind of journal.
PP: Yes, I’d love to talk more about Libby’s letters. They seem to serve as a place for her to return to her grief, to process her life without her sister. Did you always know you’d use an epistolary form rather than a close third person perspective for Libby? What did writing through the letters allow you to do with her interiority or mourning?
LM: I mostly just had her voice in my head. I allowed her a certain amount of mournfulness but she has an ongoing boarding-house story to tell so I had to keep her a bit lively and spry as well. She also commits a murder! Which is why those letters are included.
PP: You gave a fantastic reading last night of your story, “Face Time,” about a woman communicating via FaceTime calls with her father, who is hospitalized with COVID-19 in the spring of 2020. The story takes on the 2020 presidential election, the fear and isolation of the early pandemic, with the arrival and beauty of spring. Similarly, I am Homeless if This is Not My Home braids the 2016 presidential election into its moving narrative about grief and love. In general, I find your work engaging with the current moment in incredibly thoughtful ways. I’m wondering how you decide which current events to bring into your stories and novels. What are your thoughts around including politics in your fiction?
LM: Oh, thank you for your nice words. I don’t think of “politics” as “politics” but as history just outside the window. I suppose I want a larger lens sometimes and politically engaged people because I really don’t know anyone who isn’t somewhat politically aware and thoughtful on public matters, which of course affect private matters as well. My parents were politically engaged people and ran for public office in New Jersey and won. So, they each served on their local borough council.
PP: Your prose is very lyrical. In the audience Q&A last night, you discussed musicality in your work and the music of Max Richter. You said that as writers, we’re trying to get the sound of a cello in our work. I loved that. What does sound mean to you when you write? Do you think a lot about the rhythm of your sentences as you are writing or revising?
LM: It means you have to pay attention to prose style and tone. You may have to risk sentimentality. The sound of a story is a very difficult matter. String quartets have a great advantage.
PP: I’d like to hear more about that possible need to “risk sentimentality.” I feel that your work strikes a good balance between humor and feeling. How do you navigate that balance, especially in revision? Do you find yourself naturally leaning one way or the other?
LM: In revision, you just stare at things a lot and go “Does this work?” and “Is this too stupid?” Some stupidities I end up allowing. The whole business means trusting your project and yourself but also caring for it, so, brushing its teeth, etc.
PP: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? was a special novel for me and many others. I read it at 22, and I was struck by its representation of girlhood, the intensity of young friendship, and what we remember of our first friends. There is this lovely line in the book: “Things, I know, stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before.” I’m wondering how you think and write about friendship and memory now. How has it evolved since this book was written?
LM: When I wrote that book, I was determined to take girlhood friendship seriously and not make it a young adult novel. I had seen boyhood friendships taken seriously in adult literature, but I didn’t feel justice had been done to adolescent girls and all they mean to one another in terms of infatuation, adventure, and rehearsal for the future (except, again, in YA). If the Ferrante novels had already existed, I wouldn’t have written it. But this was 20 years before My Brilliant Friend. At the end of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, I was trying to go for that musical moment we just mentioned above—in the book it is choral, but perhaps in the mind it is a cello.
PP: You have created deeply memorable characters like Tassie Keltjin in A Gate at the Stairs, Finn in I am Homeless If This is Not My Home, Sils in Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? How do characters come to you? Do they spring out of a setting, or do their voices always find their way to you first?
LM: Thank you for liking Tassie Keltjin! I feel she was my closest comrade for many years, living on my desk as she had to do. She had a voice and a presence that was not difficult for me because she was mostly observing others. Also, the point of telling is years further on in adulthood, so she had access to both childhood and perspective. Sils is just Berie’s best friend in Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and I was afraid she never quite came into as sharp a focus as I would have liked. But maybe she did. Finn, I could access through the third person. He has some things in common with other slightly hapless, slightly falling-apart men whose point of view I have written from previously.
PP: Tassie is such a compelling character! I’m also a fan of Zora from your story, “Debarking.” She’s quirky, hilarious, and unforgettable. What generally helps you build characters with a distinct voice? How does your sense of a character evolve through the revision process?
LM: I was a little afraid Zora was a bit too mad. Ira is the main character in “Debarking,” and I have a weakness as I said for falling-apart men who nonetheless keep going. Those may be the only type of men I feel confident that I know and can access. Tassie seemed very ordinary to me but sensitive and observant, so I thought she was the right voice and lens for that novel.
PP: You’ve been talking about various forms of inspiration during your week at U of M: films like Days of Heaven and Drive My Car, the music of Max Richter, books like The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and Claire Keegan’s novels. What has been a source of writing inspiration for you lately that is not a book?
LM: Oh, things from life, things that seem to contain complexity which as a writer you have to explore. I admire all the things you mention above but nothing I’m working on bears any resemblance to those, alas. That said? I did once take a Nabokov story and do a very close bounce off it. I’d never done that before. I put the son back into the Nabokov story, “Signs and Symbols,” giving him a scene and speech and making the couple very different from the Nabokov couple. I think it met with mixed reviews. But when I got the idea to do that, I felt quite possessed by it—for personal reasons. I don’t think I would do that again, however.
Well, now I haven’t really answered your question. Apologies. I suppose emotions and sounds are things one encounters in the world and the inspiration comes down to this: what would one have to write that would give the reader that feeling? In Drive My Car the feeling is very contingent upon an enactment of the final scene of Uncle Vanya. So, there is a bit of a circle there.
PP: We just read that story, “Referential,” in workshop! It was great. The mother-child dynamic and her relationship to her child’s mental illness was moving, and we could see the transformation of “Signs and Symbols.” I’m curious how you think about your work being in conversation with other writers now, or do you try to keep a sense of dialogue at a distance when writing?
LM: Well, that story stitches itself into the fabric of the Nabokov. I didn’t want anyone to think I was being surreptitious so I became blatant. It is a very open steal that is meant to honor the original. But it also wanders away enough, I think, to be in dialogue with it somehow. Yet in the end they are about different things, and the characters are so different, despite some shared composition. I wondered what would happen if one put completely different people and times into the same situation. I had read that story many times before and then suddenly wanted to focus on the mental illness part and how it deforms the mother’s life. Which is a slightly different emphasis from the Nabokov.
PP: Last night, you were asked what you’re currently working on, and you mentioned that you find it to be bad luck to talk about your work too early. As an MFA student, I’ve been thinking about what parts of the writing process are generative to do in community, and what can be damaging to the story. For you, what parts of the writing or the revision process are useful to do with others?
LM: I like to wait until the very end to show things or talk about them. Some people prefer editorial collaboration. I really don’t. This worked out well with my long-term editor at Knopf who knew how to be very hands off.
PP: In an interview with The Paris Review in 2001, you said: “To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night. To read it all in one sitting and at some point see the whole thing through in a rush is part of the process. There’s urgency and wholeness in stories.” I’m curious if you find that this is still the case for you now. Do you still write a short story all in one go?
LM: Not really, but I feel some version of it—even if it’s in notes and outline form—all at once.
PP: You’ve had such a long, accomplished literary career. What has stayed the same about your writing self, and what has changed the most?
LM: My writing self! What is that “self”? Hmmmm. I think you just have to never give up. Be willing to be a little slow but also be steady and play the long game. So, a kind of tortoise and the hare thing. Sometimes, “long career” means you just haven’t died yet.
