Lorrie Moore

Complicated, awkward, funny, cruel, heartbroken, mysterious; Self-Help forms an idiosyncratic guide to female existence which is just as relevant today as it was 30 years ago. These stories are modern America at its most real, with characters sharing thoughts and experiences they could have borrowed from our own lives. This is how to deal with divorce, adultery, cancer, how to talk to your mother or become a writer, the Lorrie Moore way.

Faber Modern Classics

Self-Help

“what is seized” reminded me of aftersun. i guess because of the idea of looking back on our parents’ lives before and during us. it kinda made me sad since my mom lost all her pictures when she was young because of a typhoon. so from time to time, i wonder what she looked like when she was my age, if i looked like her, what she did then, and what she dreamt of.

zoe ☘︎

“I felt, was to know her, to become her, to make my mother a woman with adventures,”

how to be an other woman tackles self-worth in an affair. the way lorrie moore wrote this felt like charlene’s consciousness was manipulating her to just go with the affair when in reality, she didn’t want it. she kept questioning herself why she was putting up with this set-up and “don’t you like yourself? don’t you deserve better than all of this?”

god, lorrie moore….. you got me hooked already and i want more.

“you are another woman, some crazy interior display lady in glasses stumbling frantic and preoccupied through the mannequins.”

An anthology of ten short stories focuses on women who are on the brink of loneliness--their mothers are dying, their husbands and lovers are leaving them--and who face their disappointments with anxiety laced with ironic humor. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

A week, a month, a year. The sadness will die like an old dog. You will feel nothing but indifference.

bella

“‘Your numbness,’ my mother cries softly, ‘is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.’"

“Cold men destroy women," my mother wrote me years later. "They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes —you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk. They lock the greenhouse and you are as tiny as a figure in an architect's drawing, a faceless splotch, a blur of stick limbs abandoned in some voluminous desert of stone."

This absorbing, ironic, bitter-sweet collection of nine stories marked Lorrie Moore's talented debut. Sharp, cruel and funny, the stories are presented as a highly idiosyncratic guide to female existence: 'How to be an Other Woman', 'How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)', 'How to Become a Writer', 'The Kid's Guide to Divorce'.

Beatriz Salvador 

In my little white house I am in a slump. I look around. All these possessions, all these new things, are little teeth, death markers, my home one compact little memorial park remember when they used to be caller cemeteries. Now even gravestones are called family monuments, like these things, monuments to the family. I stare at my gold faucets, my new chairs, my popcorn popper, and my outsized spice rack - thyme leaves, time leaves - and wonder how they got here, how I have arrived at this point of clutter. These things, things, things, my mind is shouting and I hurl appliances, earrings, wine glasses, into the kitchen trash and, gripped immediately by a panic, pick them out again, hurry, hurry, one by one, rinse them off, put them back away, behind their doors, watch TV, breathe, watch TV. 

A series of pictures here of mothers and daughters switching places - women switching places to take care of one another. You, the daughter, becoming the mother, the Ceres, and she the daughter, kidnapped to hell, and you roam the earth to find her, to mourn her, leaving the trees and grain to wither, having no peace, you have no peace. 

And when your mother starts to lose her mind, so do you. You begin to be afraid of people on the street. You see shapes - old men and spiders - in the wallpaper again like when you were little and sick. The moon's reflection on the lake starts to look to you like a dead fish floating golden belly up. Ask anyone. Ask anyone whose mother is losing her mind. 

Isabella 

i, personally, love this kind of writing style! it kept me engaged. the use of 2nd pov worked well for this. my fave story is "What is Seized."

alina s

Arden Kowalski

finally finished a book in october and it's the eleventh? junior year is driving me mad

Jen Estrella

That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery.
This short story collection blew me away. The stories are effortlessly deep and vulnerable but also funny (wry and dark humour, hello.) Moore's writing is sharp and intense and captures ordinary tales of ordinary people SO well. I cannot believe this is her first work. I am seriously considering giving a copy to all my friends, so they can feel the intense emotions I felt while reading this book. How to be an Other Woman, How to talk to your Mother (Notes), and How to become a Writer are probably my favourites.

Andrea Guadalupe

Patricia lee

Deailova El

Ausrine Blazyte

Mary Gillingham

Saara M

Martha F.

lamia 

Chanh

kiahna

Cassie B

Will Vunderink

In nine captivating stories, the author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? probes the pleasures and pains of modern relationships, offering poignant yet wickedly funny advice on "How to Be an Other Woman", "How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)", and for surviving other modern crises of loss and love.

Self-Help Faber Modern Classics

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