Biography

Lorrie Moore

Nicknamed "Lorrie" by her parents, she was born Marie Lorena Moore in 1957 in Glens Falls, New York, a small town in the Adirondacks. Her father was an insurance executive, her mother a former nurse turned housewife. Moore, the second of four children, remembers her parents as rather strict Protestants, politically minded, and culturally alert. They read Bible verses to their children every night during dinner. Between the main course and dessert, her father would read a passage from the New Testament on week nights and Saturday, and the Old Testament on Sundays.

A quiet, skinny kid, Moore fretted, quite literally, about her insubstantiality. "I felt completely shy, and so completely thin that I was afraid to walk over grates. I thought I would fall through them. Both my younger brother and I were so painfully skinny, it still haunts us. Here we are, sort of big, middle-aged adults, and we still think we're these thin children who are going to fall down the slightest crevice and disappear."

Moore was married to an attorney, whom she described in an interview with The Guardian: “He's an asshole. He actually does it for a living. It's amazing that people can get paid for that, but he can.” They divorced in 2001, and she raised her adopted, bi-racial son as a single mother from age 5 on. She is very protective of her private life.

Moore’s literary career began at the precocious age of 19, when she won Seventeen’s fiction award; she was an English major at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York at the time. After graduating, she moved to New York City, where she was a paralegal, and then enrolled in the MFA program in writing at Cornell University.

In 1985, her first collection of short stories, Self-Help, was published to considerable critical acclaim. The following year brought her inclusion in the influential anthology 20 Under 30, as well as her first novel, Anagrams, which challenged some more timid reviewers with its experimental form. A children’s book, The Forgotten Helper, was published in 1987 (and re-released in 2000). In 1989, “You’re Ugly, Too” became the first of Moore’s many stories to appear in The New Yorker. This story was subsequently included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. In 1990, that story was published with seven others in Like Life, a collection that demonstrated Moore’s remarkable ability to juggle everyday outrage and high tragedy with a hand so deft that her most poignant passages are often also the most hilarious or sardonic.

With her second book of stories, Moore’s reputation as a story writer was cemented, but it was her third, Birds of America, that firmly established her in the pantheon of contemporary American writers. For the first time, the praise of critics and her cult status among literary readers was matched by a several-week run on the New York Times best-seller list. But Moore does not define herself as primarily a short-story writer: halfway into writing the stories in Birds of America—an eight-year endeavor—there came a second novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?.

Her third novel, A Gate at the Stairs (2009), takes place just after the September 11 attack and is about a 20-year-old Midwestern woman's coming of age.

In 2013, she published another short story volume, Bark. In 2014, it was short-listed for the Story Prize and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and was among Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Books of 2014. The Washington Post book reviewer Heller McAlpin described the volume as a "powerful collection about the difficulty of letting go of love."

In 2018, she published, See What Can Be Done, a collection of articles, essays and cultural commentary written over three decades. Lorrie Moore: Collected Stories, published in 2020, is a compilation of stories published from 1985 to 2014. Moore chose to put the stories in alphabetical versus chronological order. "Attempting to glimpse the growth of an author through chronological arrangement is, in my opinion, often a fool's errand and even if possible and successful is somewhat embarrassing to the young author who remains alive within the older one," Moore notes. Her latest novel, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, was published in 2023.

Moore was the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she taught creative writing for 30 years. She left to join the faculty at Vanderbilt University in the fall of 2013, where she is now the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English.

She has also taught at Cornell University, as the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College, and at the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Michigan, as well as at Princeton and NYU.

Sources:

“About Lorrie Moore: A Profile,” Ploughshares, Issue 76, Fall 1998.

https://www.pshares.org/issues/fall-1998/about-lorrie-moore-profile

“Lorrie Moore: The Art of Fiction No. 167,” Paris Review, Issue 158, 2001. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/510/the-art-of-fiction-no-167-lorrie-moore?src=longreads

“Interview: Lorrie Moore on Political Correctness, Writing, and Why She’s Not Worried About Trump,” Emma Brockes, The Guardian, September 5, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/05/lorrie-moore-see-what-can-be-done-interview

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorrie_Moore