Lorrie Moore Turns to Stranger Things

Untimely deaths have been a consistent theme in Moore’s fiction. In her first collection, Self-Help (1985), Moore, then in her twenties, related the inner thoughts of a young mother whose terminal cancer has spread “like a clumsy uninvited guest.” In her follow-up collection, Like Life (1990), a 35-year-old woman named Mamie spends her days looking for a place to live and her nights dreaming about places where it’s acceptable to die. Two of Moore’s strongest stories, both from Birds of America (1998), are about the imminent deaths, or the narrowly avoided deaths, of children. “Dance in America” describes a spirited fourth-grader with cystic fibrosis, while “People Like That Are the Only People Here” takes place in a pediatric oncology ward. These last two stories represent Moore at her best: unflinching, insouciant, morbidly funny. She manages to do with her prose what the narrator of “Dance” claims to do with her body: to show “life flipping death the bird.”