MOORE, Marie Lorena 1957-

(Lorrie Moore)

PERSONAL: Born January 13, 1957, Glens Falls, NY; daughter of Henry T., Jr. (an insurance company executive) and Jeanne (Day) Moore. Education: St. Lawrence University, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1978; Cornell University, M.F.A., 1982.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—English Department, University of Wisconsin—Madison, 600 North Park St., Madison, WI 53706. Agent—Melanie Jackson Agency, 1500 Broadway, Suite 2805, New York, NY 10036.

CAREER: Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, lecturer in English, 1982-84; University of Wisconsin—Madison, assistant professor, 1984-87, associate professor, 1987-91, professor of English, 1991—; writer.

MEMBER: PEN, Associated Writing Programs, Authors Guild, Authors League of America, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: First prize, Seventeen magazine short-story contest, 1976, for "Raspberries"; Paul L. Wolfe Memorial Prize for literature, St. Lawrence University, 1978; A. L. Andrews Prize, Cornell University, 1982, for "What Is Seized," "How to Be an Other Woman," and "The Kid's Guide to Divorce"; Associated Writing Programs finalist for short fiction, 1983, for Self-Help; Granville Hicks Memorial fellow, 1983; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, 1989; Jack I. and Lillian L. Poses Creative Arts Citation in Fiction, Brandeis University, 1991; O. Henry Award, 1998, for "People Like That Are the Only People"; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, 1991.

WRITINGS:

UNDER NAME LORRIE MOORE

Self-Help (short stories), Knopf (New York, NY), 1985.

Anagrams (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 1986.

The Forgotten Helper (juvenile), Kipling Press (New York, NY), 1987.

Like Life (short stories), Knopf (New York, NY), 1990.

(Editor) I Know Some Things: Stories about Childhood by Contemporary Writers (anthology), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1992.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 1994.

Birds of America: Stories (short stories), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1998.

(Editor) The Faber Book of Contemporary Stories about Childhood (anthology), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1998.

(Coeditor) The Best American Short Stories (anthology), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2004.

Contributor of short stories to anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, edited by Walter Mosley and Katrina Kenison, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2003; contributor of stories, essays and book reviews to perodicals and magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, and Ms.

SIDELIGHTS: In a lengthy and comprehensive survey of the American short story for Harper's, Vince Passaro placed Marie Lorena Moore among a very short list of "today's best story writers." When collections of stories by Moore, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, and Lydia Davis began to appear in the late 1980s, "a new kind of work stepped out onto the American literary landscape." Passaro added that "Many of her stories are fairly traditional in structure, but there is always that quickness of movement, that slightly skewed narrative perspective that keeps you alert and a little uneasy." In an assessment of Moore's work, June Unjoo Yang wrote in the Women's Review of Books that "in the span of several novels and short story collections, she draws attention to our careless use of language, the damage that we inflict upon it and one another by skipping blithely over the underlying significance of our exchanges."

Self-Help, Moore's first book, is a collection of short stories that "examines the idea that lives can be improved like golf swings," according to New York Times Book Review critic Jay McInerney. In her book, Moore uses what McInerney called "a distinctive, scalpel-sharp fictional voice" to produce "cohesive and moving" stories. He went on to say that "anyone who doesn't like it should consult a doctor." In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani referred to the stories in Self-Help as "fine, funny and very moving pictures of contemporary life among the yuppies that help establish Miss Moore as a writer of enormous talent." She added that Moore, like her characters, "possesses a wry, crackly voice" and "an askew sense of humor."

Moore's sense of humor also won her praise for Like Life, her second collection of short stories. "It is [Moore's] laid back sense of humor and the note of alar that lend these accomplished stories their wit and depth," wrote Anna Vaux in the Times Literary Supplement. Calling Moore's sense of humor "wry" and "skittish," Los Angeles Times Book Review critic Merle Rubin nonetheless found that Moore has "very little ability to create convincing characters or tell stories that invite us to suspend our disbelief as we read them or to brood upon them after they've been read." Other critics found Moore's characters more convincing. New York Times Book Review critic Stephen McCauley saw "a new richness and variety of characters" in Like Life, while Vaux found that Moore's "women are high-spirited in their disappointments and alarming in their insights; her men are rarely so accomplished in the matter of perception. Their failure to grasp what is going on makes for some of the funnier moments here as well as some of the most surreal."

Birds of America, Moore's third collection of short stories, "is filled with portraits of lost people looking for a place to land," rather like the various birds that appear in each story, according to a reviewer in Book. The book was warmly received by critics and readers alike. A Booklist critic called it "breathtakingly funny, acutely observant, and slyly poignant," while Irving Malin wrote in the Review of Contemporary Fiction that "Moore's latest collection is her best." Passaro noted in Harper's that Birds of America "shockingly, made it onto The New York Times Book Review bestseller list for three brief but, for story fans, glorious weeks shortly after it came out." Moore's characters, mostly women, face insecurity, broken marriages, lost careers, and family tragedies with humor, resignation, honesty, and self-awareness. "Most of the stories explore the ambiguous space between the requirements of adult behaviour and the faulty equipment salvaged from childhood with which we attempt to cope with our lives," wrote James Urquhart in the New Statesman. Not all reviewers were so positive in their assessments, however. Writing in Library Journal, Joanna M. Burkhardt found the collection to be "dark and depressing," adding that there "is only so much misery a reader can endure." Yang found much to praise about Bird's of America in the Women's Review of Books, but cautioned that "At her worst . . . Moore can veer into self-indulgence, the abiding love affair with word games deteriorating into something merely clever or gratuitous."

Of her first novel, Anagrams, Moore told Ploughshares that "It got many bad reviews. . . . I actually had to stop reading them. I just couldn't take it anymore." Even if there was legitimate reason for that observation, the same could not be said for her well-received second novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? The book, whose title comes from a painting by Nancy Mladenoff, deals with the innocent dreams of adolescence as portrayed in the memories of a grown woman confronted with a failing marriage. Carole Stabile wrote in Belles Lettres that "the beauty of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? lies not in its conjuring up of teenage angst, but in its ability to conjure up much of the headiness and magic . . . that makes growing up bearable and the memory of it so exquisitely sad."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Belles Lettres, January, 1996, Carole Stabile, review of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, p. 45.

Book, July, 2001, review of Birds of America, p. 84.

Booklist, January 1, 1999, review of Birds of America, p. 779.

Harper's, August, 1999, Vince Passaro, review of Birds of America, p. 80.

Library Journal, September 1, 1998, Joanna M. Burkhardt, review of Birds of America, p. 218.

Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1985.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 3, 1990, p. 11.

New Statesman, January 8, 1999, James Urquhart, review of Birds of America, p. 58.

New York Times, March 6, 1985.

New York Times Book Review, March 24, 1985; May 20, 1990, p. 7.

Ploughshares, fall, 1998, Don Lee, profile of Lorrie Moore.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1999, Irving Malin, review of Birds of America, p. 196.

Times Literary Supplement, August 31, 1990, p. 917.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), March 24, 1985.

Vanity Fair, September, 1985.

Women's Review of Books, November, 1998, June Unjoo Yang, review of Birds of America, p. 15.*