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Like Life

4.12 of 5 stars 4.12 · rating details · 2,287 ratings · 157 reviews

In Like Life's eight exquisite stories, Lorrie Moore's characters stumble through their daily existence. These men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can't quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a M...more

Paperback, 192 pages

Published September 3rd 2002 by Vintage (first published January 1st 1990)

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May 15, 2013 Jamie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2013, short-stories

I'll confess: this doesn't have the effortless quality of the best of "Self-Help" or "Birds of America," but it is certainly worth your time if you enjoy Moore's work. Some of the humor here feels replicative rather than necessary or simply organic, but when she's on, she's one of the only writers who compels me to literally laugh out loud (which can, if you're a regular subway-passenger and cafe-camper, be v likely disturbing to those sitting around you, silently enjoying their George R.R. Mart...more I'll confess: this doesn't have the effortless quality of the best of "Self-Help" or "Birds of America," but it is certainly worth your time if you enjoy Moore's work. Some of the humor here feels replicative rather than necessary or simply organic, but when she's on, she's one of the only writers who compels me to literally laugh out loud (which can, if you're a regular subway-passenger and cafe-camper, be v likely disturbing to those sitting around you, silently enjoying their George R.R. Martin). The thing about Moore's humor is that it's never quite innocent; it often reads as reactionary to some compulsion, anxiety, or general philosophical crisis. This seems nowhere more apparent than in "You're Ugly, Too," which is, over-anthologized or not, a phenomenal piece of short fiction. The exchange between the protagonist and the man she's been set up with on a balcony gradually escalates from those humorous exchanges to a moment where you legitimately question the woman's mental stability, or lack thereof. I found myself wondering what terrible trauma would coalesce as the banter teetered over the precipice of nerves and into outright hostility. But Moore doesn't overdo it; she never does - this is also skillfully handled in the title story, where, in the climax, I thought, "Ah, fuck, she finally boiled the egg too long," but then she reels it all back in and enables the story's resolution in a perfect, basically banal manner.

The thing about short fiction is that I always gush over it (when I like it), but I never remember it. There are, I guess, six other stories in this collection, only one of which I recall not really enjoying (I think it was the first one, in fact), but I can't offer more about these 5-6 pieces. Moore seems somewhat anomalous in modern short fiction, though, because she refuses to choose either high art self-aware sentimentality or minimalist nihilism, which her contemporaries usually do - she's always tiptoeing a high wire while juggling these and other forms. Thing is, usually she lands and you're awed at her uncanny precision, and sometimes, though rarely, it never quite cooks through.(less)

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Jun 28, 2012 Emma Bolden rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 woul...more

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Feb 08, 2008 Anne Sanow rated it 3 of 5 stars

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.

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Aug 31, 2009 Lizzie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: meg-s, short-stories, nyc, 2009, used-book, borrowed

Pretty sure I borrowed this from Meg over two years ago. Sorry Meg! Thanks Meg!

On the title page is what seems to be a stamp mark from a used book store in Kho Tao, Thailand. There is probably a good story there for Meg to tell in comments.

I'm not the most practiced short story reader, with only medium Lorrie Moore exposure. In high school I got a copy of Birds of America at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago, because I liked the stickers on the cover and because that store always made me f...more

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May 19, 2007 Tao rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Richard Yates, Todd Hasak-Lowy

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.

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Feb 18, 2009 Christopher rated it 3 of 5 stars

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 my...more

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Oct 15, 2012 Laura rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: owned

I picked up this book because I was working on a short story recently and, obviously, wanted to read something that would make me want to kill myself (i.e. give up writing forever). It was excruciating to read this. So perfect! Too perfect! I look at her stories and look at my stories and then abruptly disappear into the gaping abyss between them.

Someone should start a tumblr just quoting those tight, mind-blowing turns of phrase that she does so well. Is fuckyeahlorriemoore.tumblr.com taken alr...more

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Sep 03, 2012 Tanveer added it

Shelves: maybe-someday

This book is making me depressed because I'll never be as good a writer as Lorrie Moore.

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May 25, 2009 Emalie Soderback rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-modern

This book is an inspiration in it’s quiet deliverance of realistic characters. Constructed of eight short stories about the loveliness and heartache in the smallest most trite life experiences, it was compelling and I busted through it nonstop. This created an obsession with reading as many books of hers as I could get ahold of, as is evident in my reading list for 2008; I admire her style so much.

"Moore dances around the edges of broken relationships with a delicacy that expresses both despair,...more

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Oct 11, 2009 lyn straine rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary-fiction

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 c...more

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Mar 09, 2013 Stephanie Sun rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: dead-tree, mfa

This was my response to Paul Bryant's review of Like Life (which is itself a reposting of Adam Mars-Jones's review of The Collected Stories in The Guardian, which is a collection of all of Moore's stories, not just the ones in Like Life):

Sorry to pick a fight with you on your own thread again, but I think that the reason that some people enjoy Moore's goofball humor is that she's also pretty self-aware about it most of the time. She uses it and has her characters use it as a twitchy defense mec

...more

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Oct 15, 2010 Lauren rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010-52-books, short-stories

Hit and miss. Definitely liked this better than her novel. Love some of her sentences, really like a few of the stories. The first two were a little off for me, the middle ones were my favourite, her turns of phrase and images sometimes make me stop and imagine, or laugh at how odd (but human, and real) they are - I forget the name of the story, but the guy whose wife left him for someone that is like a man out of a book (he should have asked her which book?), and all he can do is read self-help...more

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Nov 11, 2008 Ciara rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: lorrie moore fans, people who are bored & dissatisfied, aspiring short story writers

Shelves: read-in-2007, especially-great-novels

full disclosure: i really like lorrie moore's books, but i can't always tell one from the other. is this the one that is all in second-person? i don't think so. i think this is some other one. is this even a novel, or is it short stories? i can't remember. she should get her publishing house to spruce up the covers of her books a little more so i can tell them apart. basically, the four stars come from the consistent strength of moore as a writer. you can pick up anything she has written & i...more

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Oct 19, 2008 Katherine rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories, newer-fiction

Lorrie Moore is a widely-acknowledged master of the short story, and there is something undeniably masterful about the stories in "Like Life." Moore has a poetic precision with words that elevates simple descriptions into something very special, little gems like "the cool, leathery wafer" of a cat's ear between a woman's fingers.

That said, there's something about the stories that didn't resonate with me as deeply as it could have. I found them to be bleak, sometimes to the point of being hard to...more

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Apr 20, 2008 Steven rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories

Recently re-read a few of the stories in this collection. Some thoughts on those stories: “Two Boys” has a quite clever device: a parallel story about the spitting girl, which is more interesting that the main line story about the two boys. It’s a great technique for making the story about more than one thing. “Joy—” like “You’re Ugly,Too—” creates a multi-textured portrait of the character, using a mix of scenes, and close-third narrated back story. Both of these stories are models for how to c...more

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Dec 13, 2007 Juliet rated it 5 of 5 stars

in "two boys" a strange young woman is seeing two very differant guys at once. it's such a weird story. really dark and sort of funny- here's an excerpt:

"I mean, if I were sleeping with somebody else also, wouldn't that make everyone happy?" She thought again of Boy Number Two, whom too often she denied. When she hung up, she would phone him.

"Happy?" hooted Number One. "More than happy. We're talking delirious." He was the funny one. After they made love, he'd sigh, open his eyes, and say, "Was...more

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May 16, 2008 Paul rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories-are-your-friends

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 bot...more 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...

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Sep 17, 2011 Leo rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 an...more

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Oct 08, 2009 Eric rated it 2 of 5 stars

I'm a Lorrie Moore fan from the four short-stories I read before I read this book, but I might have picked the wrong book to start on. I remember not hearing much about this book but I got it for free. So all I can say is that the writing was strong but the pieces didn't seem to hold together as compared to stories of hers I found elsewhere. They didn't generate to a strong finish as much as they eloquently seemed to because of Moore's poignant style.

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Aug 05, 2009 Kevin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The character Odette in the story "The Jewish Hunter" expresses what is probably both Moore's strenght and weakness as a writer: "Nothing is a joke with me. It just all comes out like one." Funny and poignant are emotional chords played too often in the short space of this collection. On the other hand, no American writer working today deploys metaphor with such surprise and torsion. Don't miss it, but avoid the temptation to read the whole thing in a short space of time.

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Apr 03, 2012 Jamie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories, 2012, you-go-girl

Because Stephanie will freak out that the starrage isn't higher: compared to Self-Help, in which pretty much every story made me want to hug the book to my chest and wail about being "gotten" and did interesting, sweet things with the English language, only a couple of the stories in here really stood out. The musical-loving history professor with the chin hair who went to New York to visit her sister was particularly memorable.

Whatever it's still better than like 67% of what was written in the...more

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Aug 17, 2011 Aloysius rated it 3 of 5 stars

To be honest, I'm not a fan of short stories. I really found some of these hard to get through. Having said that, there were some moments of existential bliss in Moore's narratives that will make you ponder and brood for a little while. Other than that, I really didn't find anything else to cherish here as I really couldn't connect to any of there characters. I might consider looking at some of Moore's other work in future though.

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Aug 30, 2009 Laurie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1001-books-to-read-before-death

Like Life is a short story collection that I only read or had heard of because it made the nutso "1001 Books To Read Before You Die" list. That being, this has to be one of the better suggestions that list has given me.

What works about this? Well, the stories themselves are nothing more than slightly more filled in Carver stories which are set in New York and deal more with the female psyche. That being said, I feel that the comparison does her no justice. She might have a simple and predictable...more

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Oct 12, 2011 AK rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-2010

I started this in the bathroom. One of my old roommates, who was basically a stranger to me, left it in there. I started reading the first story, about dating two boys (it's called "Two Boys") and I was all, like, "uh, is this my life?! written about by a GENIUS?!" So I plucked the book from the bathroom and then took it onto the subway, where I continued to freak out. I think a lot of ladies get into reading Loorie Moore by the Principle of Overidentification. In the story "You're Ugly, Too", t...more

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Nov 11, 2011 Hazel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult, fiction, girlie-girls, lit-nerd, make-me-want-to-write, read-in-2011, she-wrote-it, short-stories

Read my blog post about Lorrie Moore, Self-Help, Like Life, and the University of Wisconsin. http://www.hazelfoster.com/2011/11/11...

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Mar 03, 2009 Tali rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary

I liked Birds of America more. I don't know if it's because I have a tendency to like the first book I read of an author the most, or if it's because Like Life is an earlier work and she's grown a lot. I give it a four only in relation to Birds of America. If it were in relation to other books, it might have a five.

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Jun 10, 2012 Lauren rated it 2 of 5 stars

Hmmm... The last chapter definitely dropped this down a whole star for me. It made no sense and was a truly weak ending to the book. Aside from that, I found most of the stories fascinating and amusing. I only wish that they somehow tied into each other, or at least all tied together in the last chapter. I didn't enjoy this disjointed feel and was really hoping for something more. That being said the way certain passages were worded made me laugh out loud!

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Jul 23, 2010 Alvin rated it 4 of 5 stars

An uneven collection, but still terrific. In a few spots the action slows and reading becomes a bit of a slog, but even at it's worst, Moore's prose sparkles with wit and insight. Also, one can't help but be impressed by her rootless, confused, and thoroughly modern characters. They're so familiar and real they leap off the page.

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Jul 14, 2012 Lane Ashfeldt rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories

So, well people have been telling me for so damn long to read Lorrie Moore, that it's a bit like when I was a teenager and everyone told me I should read Kerouac. I read 'On the Road' and went "So what, I don't even like this guy, and reading about his life is not very nice." With Moore I can at least see and admire the craftsmanship. Maybe I should hold off and give it time. My initial reaction was I found this book so depressing I wanted to drop it straight back to the library. And although I...more

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Dec 28, 2010 Karen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: jezebel-s-75-books-every-woman-shou, fiction, short-stories, lady-authors

I really enjoy Lorrie Moore's writing and point of view generally and I enjoyed this book specifically. I can relate to many of the characters, even when they're not characters that I want to relate to. This is a book about relationships between people that are often problematic or dysfunctional. In this way it is similar to Self Help, another collection of Moore's short stories. It's tone, however, is darker and some of the characters are more grotesque or absurd.

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About Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore was born in Glens Falls, New York in 1957. She attended St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where she tutored on an Indian reservation, and was editor of the university literary magazine and, at age 19, won Seventeen Magazine’s Fiction Contest. After graduating summa cum laude, she worked in New York for two years before going on to received a Masters in Fine Arts from Cornel...more

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Quotes from Like Life

“This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.” — 418 people liked it

“She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth... People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane. ” — 38 people liked it

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