Reviews
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."
incredible
finally finished a book in october and it's the eleventh? junior year is driving me mad
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.
Highlights
A week, a month, a year. The sadness will die like an old dog. You will feel nothing but indifference.
“‘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."
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.