I never had to learn how to love Lorrie Moore. She was always unrequired reading. I went to college in the ’90s, the decade of peak Moore—of her second and third collections, Like Life (1990) and Birds of America (1998)—when there were fewer distractions, when noncurricular reading greased the wheels to the real thing. A Lorrie Moore story was a tryst, a trip to Pleasure Town, something to imbibe not because it was good for you but because it was good. You were not going to be quizzed on this, or have a theory, for God’s sake—and this was a moment when you were supposed to have one. During the heady late ’90s, in Salon, Moore was asked by Dwight Garner—now a New York Times critic who reviews her books—if, while at Cornell for her MFA, she had any interest in literary theory. Her response:
I never got really completely immersed. I was at Cornell where Jonathan Culler is, and where Derrida was a visiting professor for a bit, and so it was really very much, you know, in the corridors and in the conversation at Cornell … We hung out with all the other graduate students who were clearly immersed in theory. I did take a couple of courses and read the books and I did find it interesting initially. Although the complete removal of the author from every single text was always a little alarming to me. You know, going back home and trying to write your own.
She read but did not convert; she needed no hermeneutical interventions. Alison Lurie was her mentor, but it was obvious to her that Lorrie Moore was Lorrie Moore right away: no guru, no method, no teacher.
Moore had a voice that, like Philip Roth’s, announced itself immediately. Voice is this amorphous category that most writers cling to. Everyone has one, but they are not created equal. Bad writers have bad voices, and the successful ones use them to reinforce their badness. Or, if it’s an algorithm-driven imitation of a voice, it checks all the boxes, it seeks the corporate embrace. This badness chatters everywhere. You wish you could drown it out, but you can’t. The industry tells writers they must be some version of this, because this is what people like.
