=books recently read=

Self-Help by Lorrie Moore. Go to the library looking for something specific, what it was you can't even remember anymore, but you don't find it. This is what usually happens. This is how you often find what you really need to read. What you find instead is a slim volume of short stories by an author you've heard about but never read.  She's the kind of writer you've eschewed since graduate school, because she's been published by The New Yorker and publications like it, the epitome of establishment culture and middle-of-the-road liberalism. The kinds of magazines people like to leave on their coffee tables next to the Architectural Digest to show they're still hip even though they drive a Lexus, or wish they did. You have nothing in common with such people and that must mean you have nothing in common with the writers who appear in the magazines they put on their coffee tables. What's next? Will you be reading John Updike?

You shudder at the thought.

Pull the book out from where its tightly packed on the shelf between larger, bulkier books. Turn it over, look at the author photo: an attractive white woman with long dark hair, skin pulled tight, an intensity in the eyes that makes you think she'd probably be hard to get along with, always taking offense at something or other. She looks like she must come from Connecticut or some upscale upstate New York enclave, probably went to one of those elite all-girl's school, took horseback riding lessons, with the little velvet cap and everything. Maybe you're being unfair, judging a book by its back cover author photo, but something about her screams p-r-i-v-l-e-g-e. No wonder you couldn't bear to read her. She burns you up with envy. 

You take a look at the copyright page. The book is nearly thirty years old. Yikes! Well, it's about time you got over it, dontcha think? Time you buried the hatchet with the establishment, its well-established for a reason, after all; it's not going anywhere, not anytime soon. If nothing else, know thy enemy, right?

You read the first story: "How to be an Other Woman." It's a mock guide to having an affair, written in the second person, like this review is written, as if directly to a hypothetical reader. This is a device, gimmick, style, take your pick, that Moore uses repeatedly throughout this collection, notably—and humorously—in her story "How to Become a Writer," which starts off with the best advice of all, "first, try to be something, anything else." You find this manner of writing effective, cool, hip, or it was twenty-something years ago. Still it draws you in; you wish you'd thought of it. 

There's a story where a mother warns her adult daughter never to make the mistake she did by marrying an  emotionally frigid man. Another narrated by a terminally ill children's book author—a wife and mother who decides to commit rational suicide rather than allow cancer to pick apart her life one pincer at a time. Another story  moves backward in time from 1982 to 1939 outlining the trajectory of a woman's experience of her mother all the way back to birth. You read a story about a woman who is a kleptomaniac and compulsive eater; her problems compounded by a husband who is having an affair. Then there is a story about a woman who suspects her husband is leaving her for another woman only to find that he must leave her for  reasons far more nebulous than mere adultery, compared to which overcoming sexual betrayal would be a piece of cake.

You think, well, so what? What's so new and different about these stories? Haven't there been a thousand like them? Yes, probably, which is probably why they resonate with so many readers. But to tell the truth, you really don't have a ton in common with Lorrie Moore's characters; your life has been a lot more fucked up, a lot less mainstream, even though Lorrie Moore is known for writing about offbeat, quirky, fucked-up characters. 

It's not the stories, really, but the writing that engages you. Lorrie Moore is funny, incisive, and, when it comes to turning a phrase, has a scalpel-like precision. There's a death-bed scene so viscerally particular you can't imagine it was completely imagined. A wife losing her mind stabs her unfaithful husband in the gut and compares it to trying to shove a knife into a radiator. The book is full of memorable images like this one, the kind of images that suddenly illuminate a mood or a moment, that stay with you long after the particulars and plot of a story have faded. 

You see how these stories could have spoken to you, even for you, but only if you—or someone like you—rewrote them. If you wrote them, for instance, you would write about having affairs with married men, but just for the sex, the more sordid and abusive the better. If you wrote about your parent's marriage, you'd write how it was your mother who was the cold one and your father who had to beg in vain for intimacy and how that turned him violent and crazy. In other words, Lorrie Moore writes about characters who have dysfunctional lives, but they are dysfunctional in all the familiar, typical, and therefore politically correct "safe" ways the majority of people expect; your, however, life is atypically dysfunctional, as if you came from a shadow planet outside the solar system. You never lived in a New Yorker universe. You never will. You might as well be writing in asemics. Sometimes you do. 

You were right to feel that Lorrie Moore was part of a bourgeoisie literary establishment whose canon reflects a life that bears little resemblance to yours. But wrong not to read her anyway, because she has tools you could have co-opted to your own use. It's still not too late. What time is it, anyway?