Product Description

In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #233836 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-13
• Released on: 2007-03-13
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Review
"A wry, crackly voice. . . . Fine, funny, and very moving pictures of contemporary life [from] a writer of enormous talent."
—The New York Times

"Brisk, ironic . . . scalpel-sharp. . . . A funny, cohesive, and moving collection of stories." —The New York Times Book Review

"Astonishing. . . . Moore is so good at trapping each moment in perfect, precise detail, so masterful at cynicism and wryness that her moments of poignancy and sweetness catch us completely off guard." —San Francisco Chronicle

“Sharp, flicking, on-target . . . the work of a sorcerer’s apprentice. Moore casts a cruel, mischievous spell.” —Vanity Fair

“Trenchant, funny tales. . . . Moore is much more than another chronicler of the chronically out-of-sync relations between American men and women. She writes with urgency and pace.” —People

About the Author
Lorrie More is the author of the story collections Birds of America and Self-Help, and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
HOW TO BE
AN OTHER WOMAN


Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie. First, stand in front of Florsheim's Fifty-seventh Street window, press your face close to the glass, watch the fake velvet Hummels inside revolving around the wing tips; some white shoes, like your father wears, are propped up with garlands on a small mound of chemical snow. All the stores have closed. You can see your breath on the glass. Draw a peace sign. You are waiting for a bus.

He emerges from nowhere, looks like Robert Culp, the fog rolling, then parting, then sort of closing up again behind him. He asks you for a light and you jump a bit, startled, but you give him your "Lucky's Lounge--Where Leisure Is a Suit" matches. He has a nice chuckle, nice fingernails. He lights the cigarette, cupping his hands around the end, and drags deeply, like a starving man. He smiles as he exhales, returns you the matches, looks at your face, says: "Thanks."

He then stands not far from you, waiting. Perhaps for the same bus. The two of you glance furtively at each other, shifting feet. Pretend to contemplate the chemical snow. You are two spies glancing quickly at watches, necks disappearing in the hunch of your shoulders, collars upturned and slowly razoring the cab and store-lit fog like sharkfins. You begin to circle, gauging each other in primordial sniffs, eyeing, sidling, keen as Basil Rathbone.

A bus arrives. It is crowded, everyone looking laughlessly into one another's underarms. A blonde woman in barrettes steps off, holding her shoes in one hand.

You climb on together, grab adjacent chrome posts, and when the bus hisses and rumbles forward, you take out a book. A minute goes by and he asks what you're reading. It is Madame Bovary in a Doris Day biography jacket. Try to explain about binding warpage. He smiles, interested.

Return to your book. Emma is opening her window, thinking of Rouen.

"What weather," you hear him sigh, faintly British or uppercrust Delaware.

Glance up. Say: "It is fit for neither beast nor vegetable."

It sounds dumb. It makes no sense.

But it is how you meet.


At the movies he is tender, caressing your hand beneath the seat.

At concerts he is sweet and attentive, buying cocktails, locating the ladies' lounge when you can't find it.

At museums he is wise and loving, leading you slowly through the Etruscan cinerary urns with affectionate gestures and an art history minor from Columbia. He is kind; he laughs at your jokes.

After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events. On the stereo you play your favorite harp and oboe music. He tells you his wife's name. It is Patricia. She is an intellectual property lawyer. He tells you he likes you a lot. You lie on your stomach, naked and still too warm. When he says, "How do you feel about that?" don't say "Ridiculous" or "Get the hell out of my apartment." Prop your head up with one hand and say: "It depends. What is intellectual property law?"

He grins. "Oh, you know. Where leisure is a suit."

Give him a tight, wiry little smile.

"I just don't want you to feel uncomfortable about this," he says.

Say: "Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough." Show him your bicep.


When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

You walk differently. In store windows you don't recognize yourself; you are another woman, some crazy interior display lady in glasses stumbling frantic and preoccupied through the mannequins. In public restrooms you sit dangerously flat against the toilet seat, a strange flesh sundae of despair and exhilaration, murmuring into your bluing thighs: "Hello, I'm Charlene. I'm a mistress."

It is like having a book out from the library.

It is like constantly having a book out from the library.


You meet frequently for dinner, after work, split whole liters of the house red, then wamble the two blocks east, twenty blocks south to your apartment and lie sprawled on the living room floor with your expensive beige raincoats still on.

He is a systems analyst--you have already exhausted this joke--but what he really wants to be, he reveals to you, is an actor.

"Well, how did you become a systems analyst?" you ask, funny you.

"The same way anyone becomes anything," he muses. "I took courses and sent out resumes." Pause. "Patricia helped me work up a great resume. Too great."

"Oh." Wonder about mistress courses, certification, resumes. Perhaps you are not really qualified.

"But I'm not good at systems work," he says, staring through and beyond, way beyond, the cracked ceiling. "Figuring out the cost-effectiveness of two hundred people shuffling five hundred pages back and forth across a new four-and-a-half-by-three-foot desk. I'm not an organized person, like Patricia, for instance. She's just incredibly organized. She makes lists for everything. It's pretty impressive."

Say flatly, dully: "What?"

"That she makes lists."

"That she makes lists? You like that?"

"Well, yes. You know, what she's going to do, what she has to buy, names of clients she has to see, et cetera."

"Lists?" you murmur hopelessly, listlessly, your expensive beige raincoat still on. There is a long, tired silence. Lists? You stand up, brush off your coat, ask him what he would like to drink, then stump off to the kitchen without waiting for the answer.


At one-thirty, he gets up noiselessly except for the soft rustle of his dressing. He leaves before you have even quite fallen asleep, but before he does, he bends over you in his expensive beige raincoat and kisses the ends of your hair. Ah, he kisses your hair.


CLIENTS TO SEE
Birthday snapshots
Scotch tape
Letters to TD and Mom


Technically, you are still a secretary for Karma-Kola, but you wear your Phi Beta Kappa key around your neck on a cheap gold chain, hoping someone will spot you for a promotion. Unfortunately, you have lost the respect of all but one of your co-workers and many of your superiors as well, who are working in order to send their daughters to universities so they won't have to be secretaries, and who, therefore, hold you in contempt for having a degree and being a failure anyway. It is like having a degree in failure. Hilda, however, likes you. You are young and remind her of her sister, the professional skater.

"But I hate to skate," you say.

And Hilda smiles, nodding. "Yup, that's exactly what my sister says sometimes and in that same way.

"What way?"

"Oh, I don't know," says Hilda. "Your bangs parted on the side or something."

Ask Hilda if she will go to lunch with you. Over Reuben sandwiches ask her if she's ever had an affair with a married man. As she attempts, mid-bite, to complete the choreography of her chomp, Russian dressing spurts out onto her hands.

"Once," she says. "That was the last lover I had. That was over two years ago.

Say: "Oh my god," as if it were horrible and tragic, then try to mitigate that rudeness by clearing your throat and saying, "Well, actually, I guess that's not so bad."

"No," she sighs good-naturedly. "His wife had Hodgkin's disease, or so everyone thought. When they came up with the correct diagnosis, something that wasn't nearly so awful, he went back to her. Does that make sense to you?"

"I suppose," say doubtfully.

"Yeah, maybe you're right." Hilda is still cleaning Reuben off the backs of her hands with a napkin. "At any rate, who are you involved with?"

"Someone who has a wife that makes lists. She has Listmaker's disease."

"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know."
"Yeah," says Hilda. "That's typical."


CLIENTS TO SEE
Tomatoes, canned
Health food toothpaste
Health food deodorant


Vit. C on sale, Rexall
Check re: other shoemaker, 32nd St.


"Patricia's really had quite an interesting life," he says, smoking a cigarette.

"Oh, really?" you say, stabbing one out in the ashtray.


Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had.


Warren Lasher
Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano
Charles Deats or Keats
Alfonse


Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list.


Whisper, "Don't go yet," as he glides out of your bed before sunrise and you lie there on your back cooling, naked between the sheets and smelling of musky, oniony sweat. Feel gray, like an abandoned locker room towel. Watch him as he again pulls on his pants, his sweater, his socks and shoes. Reach out and hold his thigh as he leans over and kisses you quickly, telling you not to get up, that he'll lock the door when he leaves. In the smoky darkness, you see him smile weakly, guiltily, and attempt a false, jaunty wave from the doorway. Turn on your side, toward the wall, so you don't have to watch the door close. You hear it thud nonetheless, the jangle of keys and snap of the bolt lock, the footsteps loud, then fading down the staircase, the clunk of the street door, then nothing, all his sounds blending with the city, his face passing namelessly uptown in a bus or a badly heated cab, the room, the whole building you live in, shuddering at the windows as a truck roars by toward the Queensboro Bridge.

Wonder who you ar...

Customer Reviews

This book should try medication
Maybe it was the mood I was in when I read this book, because I really loved "Birds of America," but man, did this book depress me. Every single story with the exception of maybe two ("How to Have an Affair" and "How to be a Writer") were so, so dark and sad - unnecessarily so, in my opinion. I couldn't even finish the story about the dying woman saying goodbye to her daughter and husband. And the story it followed was about a woman losing her loving mother to mental illness. Oh, and did I mention that the story that proceeded it was about a woman burying her mother? At that point I was just begging for mercy, geez! I threw this book away after I read it, not because I hated it or thought it was poorly written, just because I didn't want to spread its bad juju around any further.

These stories will make your really think
Lorrie Moore is famous for her humor, her wry use of language, and her honest look into the strangeness that is at the heart of human lives. Vintage Contemporaries has just republished her 1985 book of short stories, Self-Help, in which Moore takes the how-to genre and turns it on its head. Instead of high-minded advice about happiness, success and love, Moore provides stories that outline how to become "the other woman," lay out an ironic kid's guide to divorce, and even advise the (best?) way to face the end one's life when confronted with terminal illness.

These stories gain much of their power through the imperative voice. "Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night," Moore begins in "How to Be an Other Woman." She is talking directly to us, the readers. She is giving advice, and her characters take it, and we get to see, by the actions carried out, that she is not necessarily providing a hopeful fantasy of what we might want to be, but more a roadmap of what inherently is.

These stories are now more than 20 years old, but reading (or re-reading) them again today, they are as poignant and relevant as they were in 1985. Her subject matter is timeless--love and death and relationships with mothers--and her subjects, the characters of her stories, remain witty and edgy and current.

Moore is a writer of great talent, and her mirthful use of irony is one thing that separates her from other short story writers, has even made her a writer that other writers study and mimic and revere. Almost as if, in 1985, predicting this place she would occupy in the world, she gave us in this collection the story "How to Become a Writer," in which she bluntly lays out this admonishment: "First, try to be something, anything, else." We can only thank goodness that she didn't seriously follow her own advice.

Armchair Interviews says: Check out Lorrie Moore on Wikipedia. She sold this first book of short stories derived from her 1985 thesis when she was 26. Lucky us.

Excellent read for students of literary fiction
This and other Lorrie Moore books were favorites of almost all of the women in my MFA (creative writing) program, as well as of many of the men. We all started with Anagrams (one of my all-time favorites), then moved on to this, then Birds of America. I noticed that people who enjoy cheesey romance novels don't like this book because it portrays love in a way that's painfully familiar, lifelike. Moore is hilarious and tragic and so brutally honest she'll give you road rash at the same time that she makes your creative self blush and feel elated.