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Self-Help

Lorrie Moore

4.19 · Rating details · 10,538 ratings · 863 reviews

In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted write ...more

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Paperback, 163 pages

Published March 13th 2007 by Vintage (first published March 12th 1985)

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Dec 10, 2020 Robin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories, 2020, literary-fiction, american

Pick up this book. Worry that people who see you on your lunch break will think you're actually reading a self help book. Become instantly enamoured with the first story, How to be an Other Woman. Understand completely why David Sedaris drops everything for Lorrie Moore like a giggling fan-boy. Wish you'd written these stories first.

Cry at the second story, What is Seized. Be reminded of Billy Collins' poem "The Lanyard", except without the humour. Listen to Billy Collins read "The Lanyard" for Pick up this book. Worry that people who see you on your lunch break will think you're actually reading a self help book. Become instantly enamoured with the first story, How to be an Other Woman. Understand completely why David Sedaris drops everything for Lorrie Moore like a giggling fan-boy. Wish you'd written these stories first.

Cry at the second story, What is Seized. Be reminded of Billy Collins' poem "The Lanyard", except without the humour. Listen to Billy Collins read "The Lanyard" for the fiftieth time, on youtube, to recover from the heartbreak of What is Seized.

Feel slightly 'meh' about the use of the imperative in stories 3 and 4. Suspect that Moore might be overusing it. While it was brilliant in the first story, hope that this isn't the theme of the entire book.

Allow yourself to be completely destroyed by Go Like This. Marvel at the psychological range of the stories. Marvel at the fact that you've never read Lorrie Moore before. Cry.

The imperative is back in How to Talk to your Mother, but don't be bothered, because it's so good. Be impressed by the backwards chronology and the way the story invites you in, then slits your throat, and makes you love it anyway.

Story 7 sparkles with so many extraordinary, bejewelled sentences, mark up the pages like a maniac. Delight in how she describes her cat as a "whore", a "gorgeous nomad", an "unfriend", an "intent ballerina in a hairy body stocking".

Laugh, wildly, as you read How to Become a Writer. Remember all the heartless criticisms you received in a shitty undergraduate creative writing seminar from an asshole named Tavish. Feel a tiny, battered seed of hope stir in your heart. Think about the blank stares you receive when you share with friends that you are writing/have written a novel. Laugh some more.

Read the last story when you are really supposed to be working. Feel a terrible ache of understanding which is also sweet because you are reading the words of a totally unique and undeniable talent. Acknowledge that perhaps the imperative might have been used a few times too many, thus diluting the original zing, but feel ultimately unable to award this wonderful collection with anything less than 5 stars. ...more

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Sep 30, 2007 Jessica rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: people who cry at puns

Shelves: social-work-or-relevant

I can't remember which of her books it is, I think it's this one, in which a character observes: "This Danish is too Sweetish for me to Finnish!"

If you don't like that, you probably wouldn't like Lorrie Moore much.

And if you don't like Lorrie Moore, I probably wouldn't really like you. ...more

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Jun 06, 2010 Jessica Roy rated it it was amazing

This book is so beautiful I can't even stand it.

Choice quotes:

"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 hea ...more

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Jun 09, 2019 Michael rated it really liked it

Shelves: recs, 2019

Empathetic and clever, Self-Help muses about broken pasts and turbulent presents. In her 1985 debut short story collection Moore lends a compelling voice to the frustrations and hopes of an eclectic bunch of women living in New York. Common themes (divorce, illness, affairs, motherhood) link together the nine tales, which collectively draw an impressionistic sketch of bourgeois life in the city on the eve of Manhattan's rapid gentrification. Favorites include "How to Be an Other Woman," "Go Like ...more

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Jan 29, 2015 Sidik Fofana rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

SIX WORD REVIEW: To think, she was twenty five.

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Jul 01, 2007 Jodi rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2008-read, 2021-read

You pick up Lorrie Moore’s collection of short stories called Self-Help because you’ve always admired her writing. Plus, your own writing is often compared to hers. Not because you are a master of the form, like Moore, but more because your short stories are peppered with a sort of sad and self-deprecating humor.

What you love about reading short story collections over short story anthologies is that you can pick up the threads that move throughout the stories. Moore has a thing for opera singers ...more

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Oct 03, 2007 Stephanie Sun rated it liked it

Shelves: dead-tree, debuts

“Meet in expensive raincoats, on a pea-soupy night.”

So begins the first story of Lorrie Moore’s first book, most of which she wrote as an M.F.A. student at Cornell University. Eight words, none of which would tax the vocabulary of a fifth-grader, and yet all of the signature elements that Moore built her award-winning career on are there: the fledgling attempts at urbanity so fragile they must be spelled out (“expensive raincoats”), the perfectly failed eloquence (“pea-soupy”), and the self-

“Meet in expensive raincoats, on a pea-soupy night.”

“Last night in bed you said, ‘...I usually don’t like discussing sex, but—’ And he said, ‘I don’t like disgusting sex either.’”

Moore’s writing can seem second-rate even to sympathetic readers. She is clever but not an analytical powerhouse, peppers her dialogue with some really bad puns, and cheerfully practices ignorance of any traditional notions about plot.

In short, Moore embraces many of the worst tendencies of M.F.A. fiction and then seems to double down on them.

“‘But does it work?’ ... ‘Have you earned this cliché?’”

And yet, the accumulated effect of these stories is that of a romantic temperament that has been profoundly disappointed, and who can’t relate to that? We are all former children, after all.

As funny as she can be, Moore’s vision is fundamentally tragic. It is the great ur-pun of Moore’s oeuvre that the wisecracks that she loves so much are not cracks of wisdom so much as cracks in the wisdom that her generation received from generations previous.

It’s worth noting that the third dictionary definition for “joke” (after “a thing that someone says to cause amusement or laughter” and “a trick played on someone for fun”) is “a person or thing that is ridiculously inadequate.”

“Understand that your cat is a whore and can’t help you.”

The step-by-step life instructions peddled by the self-help industry to the disappointed romantics that make up 100% of the American adult population are probably most readily classifiable as the third kind of joke, but, as long as you’re reading these stories, they can very nearly almost feel like one of the other two. ...more

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Jan 02, 2021 Carmel Hanes rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This is not your usual short story collection, beginning with the prose style chosen in several of the stories (use of imperative sentences). While effective at creating an interesting narrative, the result was a group of stories that kept me at an emotional distance. If you like to sink your teeth and heart into characters, this might not be a style that appeals to you. The stories using a more traditional style were more enjoyable to me.

That said, the stories did offer much food for thought an This is not your usual short story collection, beginning with the prose style chosen in several of the stories (use of imperative sentences). While effective at creating an interesting narrative, the result was a group of stories that kept me at an emotional distance. If you like to sink your teeth and heart into characters, this might not be a style that appeals to you. The stories using a more traditional style were more enjoyable to me.

That said, the stories did offer much food for thought and appreciation for an unusual read on common human states of being--dissolving relationships, anxiety/paranoia, childhood versus adult views of our parents, divorcing parents. falling in and out of love, contemplating ending a life due to illness, trying to become a writer. These are heady themes and this could sound like a real downer of a book. But Moore keeps the tone light, despite the content, often in ironic or downright amusing ways. She nails a concept with the precision of a dart:

"Cold men destroy women." "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 greennness, 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..."

Or divorce:

"When your parents divide, you, too, bifurcate. You cleave and bubble and break in two, live two lives, half of you crying every morning on the dock at sunrise, black hair fading to dusky gray, part of you traveling off to some other town...."

Or, regarding a needed discussion:

"But we didn't. Not really. Oh, it drifted piecemeal into subsequent dialogues like a body tossed out to sea and washed days later back into shore, a shoe there, a finger here, a breastbone in weed tide-bumping against the sand. But we never truly discussed it, never truly. Instead, allusions, suggestions, clues, silent but palpable, crawled out of the night ocean, as in a science fiction movie: black and slow they moved in and arranged themselves around the apartment like precocious, breathing houseplants, like scavengers."

These are not quick or frivolous reads. They are stories dense with meaning and packaged in boxes within boxes. I enjoyed some more than others, with my personal favorite being How to Become a Writer, which was both witty and skeweringly apropos.

"Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or if there even is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day: like sit-ups, they can make you thin."

An interesting collection that reads like a blend of story-essay. Moore does have a unique voice and astute powers of observation on the human condition.

...more

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Nov 30, 2016 Vanessa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories

This was my first Lorrie Moore collection, and I really truly enjoyed it. However, I wasn't expecting the stories to be so brutally depressing - although there was a great amount of tongue-in-cheek humour throughout the collection (Moore has a truly biting wit), the subjects of the stories in question are not ideal for picking up if you are in a tired or low headspace.

Moore's writing is jaunty and staccato, her prose biting, and she covers a myriad of topics in this collection - everything from ...more

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Oct 24, 2011 Tristan Yi rated it really liked it

This book was a lyrical masterpiece of interconnecting words, meanings, and emotions. It was the cat's pajamas--that is, if the cat had just broken up with her boyfriend and stayed at home watching old Ingrid Bergman movies, getting over it by darkly observing the world and making the saddest jokes a cat will ever meow. That is an example of an overextended metaphor and is not that accurate in describing the amazing, heartbreaking soulfulness that is this book.

It's funny, sad, dark, and upliftin ...more

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Apr 12, 2008 Kristopher Jansma rated it really liked it

Shelves: bookblog

Years ago I read Lorrie Moore's excellent Who Will Run the Frog Hospital for a grad school class (on memoirs?) and I have been a fan ever since. Every so often I will run across one of her essays or stories and find myself in stitches, although her humor almost always comes with a healthy dose of irony or solemnity to keep it from being a pure laugh fest. This semester I began my Creative Writing course with an out loud, round-the-class, reading of an essay (which turns out to be from Self-Help)
Years ago I read Lorrie Moore's excellent Who Will Run the Frog Hospital for a grad school class (on memoirs?) and I have been a fan ever since. Every so often I will run across one of her essays or stories and find myself in stitches, although her humor almost always comes with a healthy dose of irony or solemnity to keep it from being a pure laugh fest. This semester I began my Creative Writing course with an out loud, round-the-class, reading of an essay (which turns out to be from Self-Help) called "How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliché?" Another teacher I know (recommender of David Schickler from last week) does the same thing and it turned out to be a hit for us both.

I picked up Self-Help after reading another flat-out amazing Moore story (this time in a Paris Review Collection) called "Terrific Mother," which so far ranks in my top ten short stories of all time. Self-Help turns out to contain some more definite Moore gems, though not quite so many as I was hoping for. In my Moore-zeal I also bought Anagrams (fine, I stole it from my fiance's parents) and Birds of America, which contains "Terrific Mother" as well. It also turns out that Moore may be best enjoyed in smaller doses - so it may take me a little while to get around to those other ones.

The best stories in Self-Help follow the same model that "How to Become a Writer..." does, addressing the reader in short instructive sentences... the first story, "How to be an Other Woman," opens with the sage advice to, "Meet in expensive beige raincoats on a pea-soupy night..." The advice is always fun and specific, and as the piece progresses it becomes clear that this is not a general outline for readers hoping to sleep with married men, but really a story about the instructor's affair with one, particular man.

Stories in similar form, like "A Kid's Guide to Divorce", "How", "Go Like This", and "How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)" are all great. It made me wonder why she didn't stick with it throughout, because the random, more traditional stories like "What is Seized" end up feeling oddly lacking. Luckily, these are in the minority. Still, by the end of the collection I found I was laughing less, cringing more, and generally having had enough angst for one week. I attempted to segue right into Birds of America, thinking ambitiously that I'd do a double-post this time, but this was not to be. Self-Help was thoroughly enjoyable, very original, and often very poignant, but as I said earlier, I've hit my Moore-limit for the moment.

To be fair, I don't know of any short story writers that could make me want to read two collections back-to-back... as I said last week, I hardly ever finish the ones I start. More next week...
...more

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Sep 11, 2009 Jessica Draper rated it did not like it

The blurbs and reviews on this one praised its author's sense of humor and great writing style, but I should've paid more attention to the mentions of her ability to pick out the poignant, heartbreaking moments we all share--apparently, that means parents' divorce, bad relationships, and general inability to make good choices. Yes, she's very good at description, and can turn a nice phrase. "How to Be an Other Woman" caught me with evocative imagery and a cynical but true take on what it's like ...more

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Dec 03, 2019 JimZ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

BA from Lawrence College
MFA from Cornell University
At the time of this book she was probably an Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1976 she was awarded first prize in the Seventeen magazine short story contest (she was ~19 at the time).
In review of two books of hers including Self-Help Vince Passaro says this in Harper's (August 1999): Two particular features...make her stories fundamentally different from the mainstream books of short fiction then being published: her c ...more

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Sep 21, 2009 Misha rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories, 2009

I'm having a hard time finding something to say about this collection except that I loved it. I'll soon be picking up Like Life, I think, as well as trying to learn more about Moore herself. I'm curious to know how autobiographical her writing is, because the emotions in each story just ring so true. Of course, that's what a good writer does -- taps into the commonality of human experience and shows us that we are not alone.

I really enjoyed the way Moore played with tense and point of view to t I'm having a hard time finding something to say about this collection except that I loved it. I'll soon be picking up Like Life, I think, as well as trying to learn more about Moore herself. I'm curious to know how autobiographical her writing is, because the emotions in each story just ring so true. Of course, that's what a good writer does -- taps into the commonality of human experience and shows us that we are not alone.

I really enjoyed the way Moore played with tense and point of view to tell stories, switching between past and present tense, first and second POV. And, of course, the puns. These stories are packed tightly with wit and sentiment and tenderness and tragedy and pathos and just about everything that I love in literature.

---

Sept. 21, 2009. Today is the kind of day that I needed a break from the office by lunchtime, so I wandered to my usual bookstore before grabbing Chinese at the restaurant around the corner from there. The waitress kept calling me Angel. "Here you go, Angel," she said as she handed me a plate of cashew chicken. It netted her a $2 tip on a $5 lunch.

While waiting, I read "How to Talk to Your Mother," chosen not at random but because I had one of those obligatory phone conversations with my mother yesterday after more than a year of contact only through e-mail and the occasional message. I try to call. She isn't home. I leave a message. Maybe she responds, maybe she doesn't. This is how we passed Thanksgiving, my birthday, Christmas, mother's day, her birthday. I got a check in the mail around Dec. 20 — no card, just "Merry Christmas" written on the memo line. It isn't so much that we have a contentious relationship as a non-existent one, but I don't think she's aware there's a problem, and any attempts in the past on my part to discuss things has resulted in my mother breaking down into hysterical tears and accusing me of accusing her of being a bad mother.

So yesterday I finally caught up with her on the phone, doing my duty as a good daughter to at least try to keep lines of communication open. It went as our conversations nearly always do — she talks about her job, her house, her latest online boyfriend (she now has one who has moved in and sounds rather shiftless). She makes a pretense of asking about my life, but when I try to tell her, I'm met with an absent-minded "Uh huh" before the moves on to tell me some pointless anecdote about one of her co-workers. This time I actually got in a good minute of talking about my own plans before she interjected with "Why don't you just come home. I want you home." To which I simply couldn't think of anything to say, or at least nothing diplomatic. It occurred to me to ask "Why?" or to tell her "Ohio isn't home. It's just where I'm from." Or to say I didn't feel like moving back 2,300 miles to make our relationship more convenient, when she doesn't even try to stay in touch with me here. I think I said something vague like, "We'll have to see how things go."

Which has nothing at all to do with Moore's story, which recounts the life of a mother and daughter in a series of quick flashes, each representing a year counted down in reverse to the daughter's birth. It's a rich story for its compactness, but then parent-child relationships are never simple things. ...more

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Dec 28, 2014 Kiwi Begs2Differ ✎ rated it it was ok

Shelves: gen-fiction-contemp, short-stories

Lorrie Moore has a talent with words and poetic images, but the stories in this collection were so depressing. I only loved the first one, about the woman who becomes a mistress, I found it beautifully done and deserving a high rating, but the others weren’t my cup of tea. My 2 stars rating is the inadequate but necessary average.

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Jul 09, 2007 Amber rated it it was amazing

Every single short story I wrote in my undergrad creative writing workshops was a ripoff of Lorrie Moore in some way. I'm sure I'm not the only one. ...more

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Jan 14, 2013 Joan Winnek rated it liked it · review of another edition

With much respect for Moore's compelling writing, I have found these stories difficult. I guess I am
psychologically too vulnerable. ...more

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Nov 03, 2009 gwayle rated it it was ok

A quick read. I liked the first few stories best, but it may be because the later ones seemed to reiterate the early ones: there is not a lot of range in this collection, and the tone and style got old. There are some gems in here, though: reading "How," a story about a woman falling out of love, was an uncomfortable and devastatingly familiar experience. The following passage slayed me:

Pace around the kitchen and say that you are unhappy.

But I love you, he will say in his soft, bewildered way,

...more

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Jan 02, 2021 Sarah rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, short-stories

4.5 rounded up

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Oct 13, 2015 Leo Robertson rated it really liked it

I was getting worried that my reading pace dropped to only 3 books a week!!! Because I'm reading the collected stories of Ms Moore for one, along with a number of other tomes, but I read this book within that book so it defo counts!!

(Man, now that the winter's over, I took an Easter break and haven't had alcohol since Xmas, my motivation and productivity are through the roof! Who knew that if you looked after yourself, your mental health would improve? I also have totally embraced my own self/st ...more

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Jun 23, 2015 Derek rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: highly-recommended, literary-fiction, read-in-2015, favourites, anthologies-n-short-stories

I discovered Lorrie Moore only recently in fact, but I'm certain the timing is just right, any younger I wouldn't have really 'got' her. It's like reading Scott Adams' God's Debris when you're sixteen, or something comparable to that.
I discovered Lorrie Moore while listening to the audio book of The Best American Short Stories Of The Century edited by John Updike. She was reading her story, You're Ugly Too.
I was immediately sold.

Now comes the hard part: I'm not so good at reviewing books that ...more

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May 24, 2013 Leesa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I love so many things about Lorrie Moore (one of them being her unique, wry sense of humor), but I think my favorite thing is her ability to take me so deeply into a metaphor, I almost forget what we were talking abt. Almost. She is my favorite metaphorist. Her books are like textbooks to me. One of my faves from this collection: "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 ...more

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Aug 22, 2016 Felicia Edens rated it really liked it

The title of Lorrie Moore’s book of short stories, Self-Help, is especially striking today when being happy and carefree is pretty much “advertised” to us, not only by self-help books but by a constant flow of signage posted on social media (particularly motivational quotes), also as images of normalcy are shown to us as those being full of smiles and radiating positivity (shown especially by magazines and on television). There is also the influx of artwork with inspirational sayings on them pla The title of Lorrie Moore’s book of short stories, Self-Help, is especially striking today when being happy and carefree is pretty much “advertised” to us, not only by self-help books but by a constant flow of signage posted on social media (particularly motivational quotes), also as images of normalcy are shown to us as those being full of smiles and radiating positivity (shown especially by magazines and on television). There is also the influx of artwork with inspirational sayings on them plastered all over our walls. Restaurants and dance clubs have wanted us to “drink and be merry” for ages.

Though I’m pointing this out, I’m not saying I’m exempt from this at all; I post “motivational” quotes on my Facebook page all the time and have a piece of fake ancient stone nailed to my bathroom wall that reads: “Faith is the essence of all things, Hope reflects our inner courage, Love conquers all”. (But does this ever turn you off? Don’t you sometimes want to be OK with being sad or angry or psychotic? Cynical? They will tell you “it’s OK to be sad or angry or psychotic”. Do we really *need* these reminders? Can we do without them, figure things out by experience?)

What Moore’s Self-Help does is reveal what’s underneath all of this – which I don’t think can be called a façade – but underneath this struggle to attain a particular kind of peace within ourselves – what *is* it that happens on the way? The world keeps filling us in on what a happy life entails, but what this book does is an act of subversion. Moore tells stories of characters that try to control themselves and their gut instincts and then fail, or else characters that throw away the act of controlling their inner emotions and desires completely and delve headlong into life as it comes to them, reacting and adapting to environments in ways that destroy themselves and sometimes the people surrounding them. This is important: the failure of the act of trying to be a certain way always leaves room for a bit of knowledge that this specific person/character truthfully lived *their* life and also found an intangible piece of themselves along the way. Moore’s book is a reinvention of self-help through well-crafted fiction.

That being said, Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help is tragically funny. The book is comprised of nine short stories. The first is about a young girl experiencing an affair with a married man and the banality of the experience, as well as the very real attempt of the young girl to remain indifferent to the situation, while still holding her lover’s interest. The result of this: awkward moments. Moore’s description in one scene: “When he is fast asleep upon you, in the middle of the night, send your left arm out slowly toward the nightstand like a mechanical limb programmed for a secret intelligence mission, and bring the ski garb picture back close to your face in the dark and try to study the features [of his wife] over his shoulder… slip carefully out, like a shoe horn… and go to the closet… stare at the clothes… look at the shoes… they are like small cruise missiles.”

In the second, Moore tells the story of a another young girl’s experience during the events leading up to her parent’s split; how she once saw her father as this perfect human being, so talented and so funny, and then that perception slowly changing over time, as her father, for whatever reason/s, loses his fondness for her mother (perhaps she becomes less interesting to him because of his artistic endeavors). Her mother starts to lose her mind. Moore writes of this: “When your parents divide, you, too, bifurcate. You cleave and bubble and break in two, live two lives, half of you crying every morning on the dock at sunrise, black hair fading to dusky gray, part of you travelling to some other town where you teach school and tell jokes in an Italian accent in a bar and make people laugh.”

“The Kid’s Guide To Divorce” is the perfect follow-up to the previous story. At only two pages, this story offers the alternative reaction to parents going their separate ways. A little girl entertains herself and her mother as they watch movies and shows on television. She feels cozy, she can be goofy. She is safe and secure. Her mother is her best friend. But what after this evening of R&R with mother? Moore lets us think on that by capturing the scene so perfectly and ending with a goodnight.

“How” means: how is it that you leave your lover who you have loved? Especially someone who adores you? The time it takes to finally do it is forever. A sadness lingering before the urgency to do it becomes a reality. Imagination takes hold. Moore writes: “Dream about rainbows, about escapes, about wizards. Your past will fly by you, event after event, like Dorothy’s tornadoed neighborhood, past the blown-out window. Airborne… wave hello, good-bye…”. So *that* is how.

Each story is as good or even better than the previous. One about a woman’s planned suicide after she discovers she has cancer. There are voices of acceptance as well as of dissent. What does she do? Another story is a timeline of events concerning specific experiences with *your* mother, going backward from after she has already died. Moore writes as if these were universal, and adds actual happenings like “The Dead Sea Scrolls are discovered” (1947). Then Moore writes a story about another separation of lovers, a completely different story, with completely different sentiments and hurdles. The second to last is a story of not wanting to become a writer but then doing it because it’s enjoyable, even if others don’t get it. You move onward. The last: an overweight mother deals with a cheating husband by stealing money from her company and then doing something unimaginable. But, before this: her escape into nature without a care in the world, and at the end, the best present.

These stories are astonishingly real. Sometimes we are alone in our minds and Self-Help is an exercise in sharing different fears. Lorrie Moore is a powerfully personal writer, and by the end you should be able to smile at the world with a sense of connection. ...more

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Jul 31, 2016 Garlan ✌ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: books-i-own, little-gems, short-stories, 2016-reads

A mind like a saber, razor sharp and sure. In these nine stories, Lorrie Moore chronicles the off kilter relations between men and women, using wit and cynicism to dissect their day to day lives. She commands a wonderful use of the language that reflects her unique understanding of the human condition. This is a small collection of great stories.

In “How to Be an Other Woman” the protagonist reflects on her relationship with a married man -
“When you were six you thought mistress meant to put yo ...more

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Apr 25, 2019 Oni rated it really liked it · review of another edition

How to write a stunning collection of short stories that turns the self-help genre on its head, exposing the delusions and vacuity of easy self-improvement strategies while simultaneously capturing deeply human fears and longings:

1) Be a writer named Lorrie Moore. Write nine short stories and group them in a collection called Self-Help. Publish it as your debut in 1985.

2) Parody the tactics of self-help manuals and be inspired by the precepts of Oulipo literature, finding freedom and a breath of ...more

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Jan 22, 2018 Haley rated it really liked it

I absolutely loved the first story, which felt perfectly executed, though I think some of the features that so won me over with this first story - the focus on wordplay, the interesting use of the imperative/second person point of view, the polished integration of recurring elements - felt less fresh/noteworthy when it appeared in other stories. Moore has a powerful, engaged wit, which she lends to her protagonists (generally women of dubious mental health or women who are in compromising circum ...more

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Jun 03, 2012 Vincent Scarpa rated it really liked it

Shelves: favorites

I just really like Lorrie Moore. I think there's tons of valid criticism to be made about this book, and even she herself has called the stories "chock full of mistakes of judgement and taste and sensibility," but I admire this collection. It's bold— in style, in presentation, in form. The three longest stories are in the 1st or 3rd person, but the rest are all in the 2nd person, which I tend to disagree means "instructive you," even if the titles begin with "How to..." There's something to be s ...more

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Apr 20, 2008 Steven rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories

This collection still seems as innovative and inventive as it did when I first read it in ’85. Her “How to…” stories had such a spark of originality about them that stylistically they couldn’t be copied. Second person point of view feels fresh again. Of course it’s not just the POV. She combines that with a unique syntax that makes ordinary words fresh. And the ironic and sarcastic humor, a loose mask for an incredible bitterness, a bitterness that really only comes out in the humor. In her late ...more

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Aug 02, 2015 Lindsay Andros rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2015

Compelling and often heart-wrenching stories that work together perfectly as a collection, with characters and scenarios popping up in one story that were mentioned briefly previously. These stories were written thirty years ago, but were still powerful enough to make me want to call my mother and tell her I love her. Though they are typical in their topics, they are very atypical in their telling: second-person, how-to-style manuals. Very intriguing and unique.

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Sep 12, 2016 G L rated it it was amazing

Shelves: faves

This collection of short stories is like having a hug from your best friend when you're crying then suddenly it's a slap and she's telling you to 'stop being a whiny little shit'. In the best possible way. It's like Lorrie Moore has lived a thousand different lives as a thousand different women, its tender and cathartic and cold and shrewd. I love it. ...more

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About Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore

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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 Self-Help

“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.” — 134 likes

“Your numbness 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.” — 71 likes

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