Lorrie Moore is leaving the University of Wisconsin.

A sad day for us!

She came here in 1984 — the same year I did — back when "Self-Help" was still a manuscript.

Do I even have to say it?

I'm reading this NYRB essay by Lorrie Moore and I get to this passage:

Barbara dies at fifty-five—the halfway point of the book. Meghan O’Rourke has up until now proceeded with the vitality of a first-rate dramatist and her mother is a character well suited to it, equipped with an irrepressible spirit and a Christmas Day death, on a bed in the middle of the living room (so that death will be less “bureaucratic and fluorescent”), breaking the heart of everyone.

You know, what I'm going to say now, don't you? It's not about death or Christmas or writing style.

The reason to read fiction: to engage with the mind of someone who isn't trying to sell you anything.

Argues Lorrie Moore (who's not saluting but having trouble keeping the light out of her eyes):



I love the idea that what we want from reading is to intertwine our minds with the mind of another human being and I understand why Moore connects that to freedom from commerce and why she find that purity in fiction. The funny thing is to want to write when you don't want to sell anything — even any ideas. It's not always true of fiction and not only true of fiction, but it is what we really want to read, isn't it?