Lorrie Moore

Her collection of short stories is especially celebrated; Moore is often considered one of the greatest living American short story writers.

In 2023, I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction.

Awards, Recognition & Academic Roles

• Moore won the O. Henry Award (1998) for her short story “People Like That Are the Only People Here.”

• She was named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006.

• Her short story collection Birds of America won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.

• Bark was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.

• In her academic career, Moore was the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (for about 30 years), before joining Vanderbilt University in 2013 as the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English.

Writing Style, Themes & Influence

Style & Voice

Lorrie Moore’s writing is recognized for:

• Dark humor and irony: Even in emotionally heavy moments, her prose often contains a twist of wit.

• Precise, elegant language: Her sentences are carefully crafted, often lean, with subtle emotional inflections.

• Interior psychological depth: She probes characters’ inner lives—regret, longing, small failures—without overt melodrama.

• Structural experimentation: Some stories play with narrative voice, fragmentation, or shifts in temporal perspective.

• Balance of melancholy and vitality: Her stories often dwell on loss or absence but find energy in language, memory, and fleeting connection.

Recurring Themes

• Loss, grief, and absence

• Relationships and intimacies: friends, lovers, family

• Identity, memory, and self-discovery

• Loneliness and connection

• Humor in the face of suffering

• The tension between everyday life and deeper emotional worlds

Her influence is felt among writers of fiction who aspire to combine emotional honesty with stylistic subtlety. She is often cited as a master of the short story form, and many contemporary writers acknowledge her impact.

Famous Quotes

Here are several notable quotes by Lorrie Moore that capture her sensibility and thinking about writing, truth, life, and the human condition:

“Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one’s life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence.”

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”

“The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, ‘Write something you’d never show your mother or father.’”

“Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.”

“If prose can cast a spell, we will listen to it no matter what it’s saying. … But if the language doesn’t cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened.”

“I don’t think of myself as writing comedy. I think I’m writing tragedy. But then time goes by … tragedy plus time is comedy.”

These quotes reflect her layered, reflective, and somewhat self-aware stance toward literature and life.

Lessons from Lorrie Moore

1. Let complexity live in your work
   Moore’s stories rarely offer simple resolutions. They dwell in ambiguity—teaching us that human lives seldom follow neat arcs.

2. Balance emotion and restraint
   Her writing shows deep feeling without sentimentality, proving that powerful emotional truth can coexist with discipline.

3. Use humor as a companion to sorrow
   Her ability to insert wit into serious terrain encourages writers to find laughter, even in darkness.

4. Keep evolving & experimenting
   Moore moves between stories and novels, and tries narrative shifts. She doesn’t remain static.

5. Teaching and writing can coexist fruitfully
   Her decades-long teaching career didn’t stop her creative output; rather, it seems to have enriched it.

Legacy & Contemporary Importance

Lorrie Moore’s legacy is already considerable, and still growing:

• She is widely considered among the most accomplished American short story writers of her generation.

• Her books are frequently included in university creative writing curricula, not only for their craft but for how they show what contemporary fiction can do.

• With I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, Moore continues to push boundaries of form and genre even into later stages of her career.

• Her style—combining emotional rigor, humor, and formal care—serves as a model for writers wanting to balance artistry and lived intimacy.

• Her influence reaches across generations: both aspiring writers and established novelists often point to Moore as a benchmark in literary fiction.

Conclusion

Lorrie Moore remains a vital and singular voice in American literature. From the early success of Self-Help to her recent prize-winning novel, her career demonstrates sustained mastery, fearless experimentation, and a clear, courageous vision of what fiction can do. Her writing holds tension, humor, sorrow, and hope in delicate balance—inviting readers into emotional landscapes they recognize but seldom name.