Like Life by Lorrie Moore

Like Life Reviews

• 
  Bill Kerwin

  
  Are you the kind of person who has a sarcastic sense of humor but find yourself surrounded by people who can't seem to get the joke? If so, you might really like this book.
  
  These are bleak, funny stories about lost people, written in a brisk, colloquial prose that sparkles with a wit that never masks the desperation of the characters' disorganized lives. The typical story features an East Coast intellectual woman marooned in the Midwest, using irony to defend herself in an environment impervious to irony.
  
  All the stories have merit. "Two Boys, "Joy" and "Places to Look for Your Mind" are very good, and "You're Ugly Too" is excellent.
• 
  Guille

  “El mundo siempre era pequeño, independientemente del mundo que fuera, y se trataba de seguir adelante y de decir cosas sobre él.”

  Uno lee el título, “Como la vida misma”, y piensa, joder, esto va a ser triste. Pobre vida, qué mala prensa tiene. Después uno empieza a leer los cuentos, varios de ellos, y en efecto, es triste. No hay crímenes, ni enfermedades o accidentes mortales, no hay guerras ni hay grandes desastres, ni siquiera pandemias, pero es triste, mundos pequeños con sus tristes y pequeñitos desastres cotidianos (excepto, justamente, el cuento que da título a todo el volumen, esas cosas que pasan en la vida misma). Personas, casi todas mujeres, que se sienten solas, perdidas, sin comprender muy bien como han llegado hasta ahí. Lo bueno es que todos ellos tienen el sello Moore, una escritora de voz inconfundible y con una inteligencia prodigiosa capaz de convertir la tristeza, esa forma de cordura que dice la autora, en algo bastante divertido sin hacerla banal.

  “El mundo era precioso, de verdad, aunque complicado e irritable con las pequeñas cosas, como un dios que no se deja ver mucho.”

  En algunos relatos el humor proviene de los mismos personajes, otras veces es la misma narración la que se encarga de ello, pero en ambos casos, el humor es una defensa ante ese mundo que los agrede o una forma de sobreponerse a la incomodidad de una situación o de aguantar un poco más con aquello con lo que se han conformado y hasta una forma de mortificarse al darse cuenta de que aquello que les parecía tan necio les gusta un poquito o por no ser capaces de ser justo el tipo de persona a la que les guste. Un humor ácido y feroz, marca de la casa, pero que también es compasivo con estos personajes que anda por su pequeño mundo un tanto perjudicados. Como dijo la propia autora: «El humor es un acto de resistencia y supervivencia».

  “—Para ti todo es un chiste
  —Para mí nada es un chiste. Lo que ocurre es que todo me sale como si lo fuera.”

  
  
  
  P.S. Entre los relatos del volumen, dos han sido seleccionados en sendas antologías del cuento norteamericano. “Además usted es feo”, mi favorito, aparece en la antología que preparó John Updike. “Como la vida misma”, el menos interesante para mí, se puede leer en “Antología del cuento norteamericano”, de Galaxia Gutenberg, en la selección realizada por Richard Ford.
• 
  Lisa

  [3.5] I can see why Lorrie Moore is a writer's writer. Her sentences are exquisite and strung together are sometimes spectacular. But for me, the parts are greater than the whole. I admired these bleak, clever and ironic stories but they didn't enter my heart.
• 
  Tao

  I like this book.
  
  I have read this book many times. I do not read it that much anymore. A lot of it is annoying to me now but I read it many times before. I read some of the stories maybe 10 times.
  
  I feel like Lorrie Moore worked a lot harder and longer and with more agony in her face while editing than anyone else I have read, for short stories.
• 
  Anthony

  Lorrie Moore is one of my favorite short story writers. Her voice is singular, capable of crafting laugh-out-loud moments on one page, and eerily wistful moments on another. There are times when her zippy, free-wheeling style feels a bit too clever to allow all of her wonderfully weird and fragile and goofy characters to come fully to life, but at her best, she carves out indelibly rich portraits of lost, confused, witty souls fumbling their way through their lives.
• 
  Snotchocheez

  
  Each book I've read of Lorrie Moore's slides me even closer to unconditional love. (okay, not yet reaching for hyperbole like "she can transcribe the Phone Book and I'd read it" but pretty close). From sentence construction that sets off Pavlovian salivation to her ability of taking mundane, random life moments and transforming them into something universally relevant, Ms. Moore's made my "Must Read Anything of Hers" list. Six of the 8 stories of her Like Life were a joy, though because it was so short, the few stories that were missteps (including the last, "Like Life", a needlessly peculiar dystopian experiment channeling Margaret Atwood) were jarring. Still absolutely enough here to savor. Can't comment on her newer stuff, but her earlier collections like this (and Birds of America) place her firmly among the very best contemporary American short story writers today.
• 
  Paul Bryant

  Adam Mars-Jones has this to say about LM:
  
  "The dominant influence on American short fiction when Moore started publishing was the stoic minimalism of Raymond Carver, the recovering binger's pledge of: 'One sentence at a time.' She escaped that influence, and was spared the struggle of throwing it off, but its underlying principle of whittling away excess is something her stories badly need. A Lorrie Moore story can sometimes be like a schoolroom full of precocious kids, every sentence raising both hands and squeaking: 'Me! Me! Choose me!'
  
  There's no escaping the fact that most of the outgrowths on Moore's prose, begging to be sanded down, are wisecracks, puns and jokes. In one story, the title character remembers that when she lived in New York: 'Everyone tried hard to be funny. Everywhere you went - a store, a manicure place - someone was telling a joke. A good one... it was like brains having sex. It was like every brain was a sex maniac.' Moore's humour isn't like that. It's closer to a compulsion than a talent, with the desperation of someone trying to repeat a trick that brought the house down once without her quite knowing why, and it prefers bad jokes to no jokes at all. She describes the heroine of 'Community Life' as being 'in bed, a book propped in her lap - a biography of a French feminist, which she was reading for the hairdo information'. Forget about losing respect for the character - it's hard not to lose respect for the writer.
  
  Jokiness percolates down into the narrative voice ('It came out wrong, like a lizard with a little hat on'), but also bursts out whenever people open their mouths. Moore makes a number of attempts to account for this. Might it be a marker of a dysfunctional relationship? ('You see how I'm talking? Things are wacko around here.') Perhaps it's an individual pathology. ('Everything's a joke with you.' 'Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.') There may even be a deeper principle involved - 'Overheard, or recorded, all marital conversation sounds as if someone must be joking, though usually no one is.' Except that every conversation in the book, by this yardstick, qualifies as marital.
  
  Two stories in this collection stand apart, one by virtue of seeming autobiographical to the point of postmodernism, the other by taking place in a parallel universe. The first story is 'People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk' ( Moore never seems to have found a title arch enough to satisfy her, but surely this time she comes close). It's about the Mother, an unnamed writer of Moore's age whose baby boy is diagnosed with a kidney tumour (Peed Onk being shorthand for paediatric oncology). Her husband tells her to make notes for a story, since they may need money for the medical expenses.
  
  In theory, then, this is about a piece of life too raw to be transformed into fiction, but in practice, it's the most mannered and posturing thing in the book. The Husband says (why Husband and not Father?): 'You know, in a way, this is the kind of thing you've always written about.' The Mother agonises in a philosophical register: 'How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveller's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it.. one can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms.'
  
  The wisecracks don't actually stop, they just become grotesque, with the Mother imagining an interlocutor speaking in rebuttal: 'What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future... therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery and - let's be frank - fun, fun, fun! There might be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels.' It's all simultaneously self-indulgent, while imagining it's writing degree zero. Towards the end of the piece, the Mother bridles at the phrase 'collateral beauty', used by the parent of another child with cancer, thinking: 'Who is entitled to such a thing? A child is ill. No one is entitled to any collateral beauty!' Except her, of course, who a page or two back was describing 'the black marbled sky and the electric eyelash of the moon'.
  
  The other story, 'Like Life', is set in a Eighties New York where it's illegal to unplug the television and the water from the taps is too caustic to bathe in, let alone drink. Young men are dying, so that women have to date men twice their age, except for Mamie, who has Rudy. This is an Aids-era story with the epidemic somehow mutated, and it's fascinating to see how removing the reference points adds to its power. Moore even goes cold turkey on the wisecracks, right up to the moment when Mamie asks Rudy what he fears, and though previously inarticulate he shoots back: 'The Three Stooges, Poverty, Obscurity, Masturbation. Also the three E's. Ennui. Anomie. Misery.' Nothing dispels atmosphere more effectively than jokes fired at random.
  
  The real tragedy is that Moore's self-presentation isn't even an original way of nullifying the threat of being female and clever in America. Nothing could be more traditional than apologising with kookiness for an intelligence too strong to be hidden. Would she really rather be cute and goofy than smart? It's a bad bargain because she cheats herself and her readers of something that had a real chance of being original and fierce."
  
  
  http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/g...
  
  
• 
  Jemppu

  There is something so very unique in Moore's capability to bring out the combination of flavours, and dally with the small absurdities of life in a way that enhances the fragility of the portrayed moments and the authenticity of the characters.
  
  Such a masterfully handled, delicate balance keeps you tickled and inescapably attentive.
  
  _____
  
  Reading updates.
• 
  lyn straine

  Lorrie Moore is one of my favorite contemporary authors. I have a big collection of her short stories on order from Amazon, but I was glad to see this smaller, early collection hiding in the library (most places only carry Birds of America). Her writing is so poignant, incisive and witty, with such precise and startling figures of speech--I both love it and hate it at the same time, because I know I'll never achieve what she manages to in prose. Moore's gifts are luminous; that rare person who can make you laugh while you cry.
• 
  George

  An interesting, clever, witty, sometimes poignant, concise collection of eight short stories about a number of ordinary characters who struggle to find purpose and meaning in their lives. Here is a snapshot of some of the stories. A woman with two boyfriends, a playwright who has been writing a play for four years and becomes too clever for his own good, a woman in her thirties starts dating a Jewish hunter with continually surprises consequences and a fifteen year old marriage that turns unexpectedly.
  
  Interesting characters, surprising plot twists and a precise, vivid writing style make this short collection a worthwhile read.
  
  Here is an example of her writing style:
  
  ‘Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn’t a big boom sound.’
• 
  Teresa

  A sinopse diz que esta colectânea de contos descreve o abismo emocional entre homens e mulheres e o receio de uma ligação afectiva. Não confirmo nem desminto, pois não consegui ultrapassar o abismo existente entre mim e a escrita de Lorrie Moore.
  Comecei todos os contos e só consegui terminar o primeiro. Tenho pena...talvez com "Pássaros da América" seja diferente...
  
• 
  Anne Sanow

  I know this is supposed to be everyone's "early"-Moore favorite, but it just isn't mine. The much-anthologized "You're Ugly, Too" is fine--not brilliant, sorry, but perfectly fine--but I find many of the others to have a weird kind of rage or self-hatred or insecurity or something boiling up from within that gives them a sour tone. Moore harnesses all that said rage/self-hatred/insecurity to better effect elsewhere, I think.
  
  
• 
  Tuck

  she is the best. these stories' voices change too, from super modern like joe meno or ben ehrenreich to old fashioned like john cheever or ozick. here's a quote "....and left the apartment to roam the streets again, to find an open newsstand, a safe coffee shop that didn't put a maraschino cherry on the rice pudding, so that even when you picked it off its mark remained, soaked in, like blood by Walt Disney."
  
  
• 
  Christopher

  I have to give this collection three stars because Lorrie Moore's writing is just that good; no matter what her subject matter, at the very least, I always enjoy hearing her voice and encountering her narrative structures. However, it's a somewhat mean-spirited collection. Almost all of the characters are women displaced from the East Coast to the Midwest, who seem not necessarily unable to understand midwestern culture so much as unwilling to even attempt to, and because of this I often find myself wrinkling my nose at the many characters who come off, intentionally or unintentionally, as the snobs they think their midwestern neighbors think they are. The title encapsulates the overarching position Moore presents about the midwest in this book: that it is "like life" there, but not real life, not really.
• 
  Connor O'Brien

  i read this book while i was backpacking through europe, the stories are very funny and also very depressing.
• 
  Amy (Other Amy)

  She finally didn't care to understand all that much about her emotional life; she just went ahead and did it. The point, she thought, was to attend the meager theater of it, quietly, and not stand up in the middle and shout, "Oh, my God, you can see the crew backstage!" There was a point at which the study of something became a frightening and naive thing.
  
  I'm not sure how to review this surprisingly uneven collection of tales. None of them really hauled me in, but there were lovely moments of lightning shot throughout. Unfortunately, I am fairly jaded to books about people grappling with their questionable decisions. If I want stories like life, I can generally just live mine. Still, some very nice flashes of lightning in here, and half the stories are gems I am really glad to meet.
  
  I wish I could understand Boxall's people. I really do.
  
  Two Boys ☆★★★★ - A little light love triangle. No one ever gets hurt with these things, right?
  Vissi d'Arte ☆☆☆★★ - A fool is a fool.
  Joy ☆★★★★ - Don't let the bastards get you down.
  You're Ugly, Too ☆☆★★★ - Parties and love are two things I can always do without, but sisters aging gracelessly is phenomenal, so a split the difference kind of story.
  Places to Look for Your Mind ☆☆☆☆★ - In all honesty, I couldn't deal.
  The Jewish Hunter ☆☆☆★★ - Almost couldn't deal with this one either.
  Starving Again ☆★★★★ - Some friends get dinner and drinks and talk about love and death.
  Like Life ★★★★★ - The truly brilliant story in the collection. A pandemic forces a small reckoning.
• 
  Billie Pritchett

  This book, Like Life, was Lorrie Moore's second short story collection. Her first collection,
  Self-Help, was brave, you could really get the inside of a life in that one, and the stories there were written mostly in the second person, which spawned a generation of copycats. I love Moore, but Like Life feels like a sophomore slump. All the stories, written in the third person, have a vague theme of late-80s/90s suburban loneliness (very of its time, for better and worse). Most of the stories involve smart white women with goofy white men. "You're Ugly, Too" is the most evocative. A woman attends a Halloween party and spends her time there talking to a man dressed in the costume of a naked woman. I couldn't tell you what the story amounts to, though, because it didn't leave me wanting to check in with it again. The same goes for "Places to Look for Your Mind" and "The Jewish Hunter."
  
  A lot of this is a matter of taste, but a good litmus for me as to whether a story is a great story is whether it left me spooked and wanting to revisit it later. I do feel that way about her first collection,
  Self-Help and would definitely recommend everyone reading that. I intend to read all of Moore's stories and maybe her novels. She's a craftsperson. She's a worker.
• 
  Kim Lockhart

  These stories are an ode to those of us who feel like we are bumbling through the absurdities of life. Moore crafts her phrases with precision. The descriptions often hold more weight than the content. No one else has so deftly captured the state of the modern wandering unfulfilled self.
• 
  Leo Robertson

  Re-read:
  
  2 1/2 years since last time?! Scary.
  
  Think I thought I'd understand these stories better on a re-read. But while they make interesting points, they're also obliquely oblique. How annoying!
  
  First review:
  
  I knew I was going to love this one. Which I guess is why I avoided reading it for so long. I don't think I like guaranteed pleasers!
  
  What We Life When We Love About Like
• 
  Ben

  A guy visits his doctor and the doctor says, “Well, I’m sorry to say, you’ve got six weeks to live.”
  
  “I want a second opinion,” says the guy….
  
  “You want a second opinion? O.K.,” says the doctor. “You’re ugly, too.”
• 
  Emma Bolden

  I am already regretting only giving this collection four stars, and will probably change that soon. I didn't love this as much as Self-Help and Birds of America, but it's a stunning book. I think my main sticking point with it is the title story -- I couldn't really figure out why or how it was set in The Future. Then again, I have very serious ideas about setting a story in The Future -- I feel like The Future needs to be absolutely necessary to the plot. If this story were set in 1988, it wouldn't have made a difference at all, except that I wouldn't be thinking "wait a minute, why is this in The Future again?" every few sentences. This is kinda the same issue I had with the last two chapters of A Visit from the Goon Squad, though, after many moons of reflection, I've accepted the fact that the final chapter needed to be set in The Future. Now ending my rant about The Future. All in all, this was a tight collection of stories. I feel like this is really Moore's form -- there's something about the short story that makes her writing take off. I found myself re-reading and re-re-reading certain sentences, trying to absorb their construction, their syntax, their wording, then shaking my head and saying, "Now THAT is how you make a SENTENCE." Moore's stories are certainly captivating, and they're perfect teachers for writers who want to learn more about their craft.
• 
  Leo

  Moore is amazing. She's able to weave in and out of the empty gaps of people's lives and put down markers on her pages as stories. Without naming them, she simply points out the little aches that we don't know what to call and taps you on the back and says, "There, there." Sure, it's not a cure, and certainly, awareness doesn't solve anything, and neither does a tap on the back, but it's something and that something should count; if only to show that others, too, have those same nameless gaps and aches.
• 
  Vivienne Strauss

  one of the funniest bits to me from the title story:
  
  People with money would spend six dollars on a cocktail for themselves but not eighty cents toward a draft beer for a guy with a shirt like that. Rudy would return home with enough cash for one new brush, and with that new brush would paint a picture of a bunch of businessmen sodomizing farm animals. "The best thing about figure painting," he liked to say, "is deciding what everyone will wear."
• 
  RP

  Do you live alone? Is your tub overflowing with sewage? How many cats do you own? Are they ill? You enjoy puns, right? Do you live above a butcher shop? Are you in love with two boys at once, but can't pick which you love more? Is someone you know very ill? Is a British boy living in your absent daughter's room? Well?
• 
  Alan

  1993 notebook: a long flirtation on trains and buses with Lorrie Moore's 'Like life', wicked, funny, sad, deep, just great stories. Good place to read them too, commuting among so many different people with different plans and ambitions.
• 
  Kate

  i read this on the train home mainly
  the platform is made of wooden planks on some of the parts
  i think i only have anagrams to read now maybe
  bananagrams
• 
  fioo ! ♡ ∗ ˚ ˖࣪ ∗ ‎˖ ݁ . ° · ˚ ₊

  no sé muy bien cómo sentirme sobre esto, pero debo decir que no me arrepiento nada