Mon Day May XXth OT – Doc, I would like a second opinion...

Lorrie Moore won the National Book Critics Circle Award for I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home in March. She's long been one of my favorite short story writers, but I Am Homeless... is the first novel of hers I've read. She's very funny and twisted, there's a sharp edge to her humor. There's a darkness even in her earliest stories, and they've only gotten darker. Themes and humor have remained pretty consistent overall. There's a cancer, sometimes literally, behind every joke. A pun or a riddle at the end of the world. I love her and have been slowly rereading the collections of her work I have in the house.

This is the cover of the copy I own (1990)

Below are a couple snippets I liked from "You're Ugly Too", hand copied from the text months ago and retyped this morning by me. Any errors are mine as I can't read my own handwriting. About Zöe Hendricks and her history of dating rotten men: 

    The third guy was a political science professor named Murray Peterson, who liked to go out on double dates with colleagues whose wives he was attracted to. Usually the wives would consent to flirt with him. Under the table sometimes there was footsie, and once there was even kneesie. Zöe and the husband would be left to their food, staring into their water glasses, chewing like goats. "Oh, Murray," said one wife, who had never finished her master's in physical therapy and wore great clothes. "You know, I know everything about you: your birthday, your license plate number. I have everything memorized. But then that's the kind of mind I have. Once at a dinner party I amazed the host by getting up and saying good-bye to every single person there, first and last names."

    "I knew a dog who could do that," said Zöe, with her mouth full. Murray and the wife looked at her with vexed and rebuking expressions, but the husband seemed suddenly twinkling and amused. Zöe swallowed. "It was a Talking Lab, and after about ten minutes of listening to the dinner conversation this dog knew everyone's name. You could say, 'Bring this knife to Murray Peterson' and it would."

    "Really," said the wife, frowning, and Murray Peterson never called again.

And when she's caught on the balcony at her sister's halloween party with another rotten man:

[...] She thought of gorillas, how when they had been kept too long alone in cages, they would smack each other in the head instead of mating.

It's a gut punch of a story, though not as painful as "People Like That Are the Only People Here" from Birds of America. And if "People Like That..." is a punch in the gut, I Am Homeless... is a bullet. From the first act or early second, you're Mr Orange. 

Congratulations, Lorrie Moore!

Sort of speaking of screaming– or joking– into the void, Best Björk is Punk Björk, IMO: