How Reading Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help Is Like Swimming in a Public Pool

I read at swimming pools. And because I’m borderline schizophrenic, I sometimes have trouble differentiating between fictional narratives and reality. Or maybe that’s just one of the many neuroses that accompanies writerhood. Potentially both are true. I read Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help poolside, and I watched the characters walk off the page and into swimming trunks and Spongebob floaties.

There was the wife watching her husband oogle the girl in too-small bikini.

There was the mother clipping a leash to her 13-year-old child.

There was the grandmother coating her leathery skin in coconut oil.

Mostly women, mostly in relationships, and mostly enacting self-destructive behaviors, these pool dwellers made it easy for me to draw swooping parallels. They laughed. The loved. They made ridiculous mistakes. In short, they lived. Like these people, Lorrie Moore’s characters are heartbreakingly honest.

You could work with the woman catering an affair with a married man.

You could babysit the 12-year-old girl exploiting her parents’ divorce for 7up.

You could have lunch with the mother, wife, and cancer victim who commits suicide.

But Lorrie Moore does more than offer you a glimpse into their lives. It’s not only voyeurism that makes these stories so satisfying. It’s not just that you watch their struggles and learn from their mistakes. It’s that you become these characters.

Since the dawn of the creative writing workshop, much has been said about the second-person narrative. Mostly in the form of, don’t do it. It’s gimmicky. It’s confrontational. You can’t pull it off. On the flip side, if you do pull it off, it creates urgency and snap, like a green bean begging to be eaten. The reader and story fuse.

At the swimming pool, as in these stories, I was not just watching the people around me. I was keenly aware of myself as part of the scene. I played a role in the narrative, and was, in fact, that girl in too-small bikini (it's probably time I buy a new one). I swam with them, sometimes barely keeping my head above water. I played with their children. I sunburned.

Lorrie Moore doesn’t offer a ten-step guide to beating depression or reveal the secret to driving your dream car. Instead, she gives us experiences that closely mimic her own. The characters aren’t helping themselves. More often than not they end up fired or dead or in a mental institution. But ironically, I still felt helped.

Because Lorrie Moore is an artist.

She can describe a bleeding wound, and we at once feel pity for the victim and awe for the scribe. We’re marveled by her ability to spin scabs into golden stories, and because we’re human too, we feel as though we may be capable of some such level of greatness.

Despite the strong emotional connection, the collection does indeed have some flaws. The drug-induced haze at the end of “Go Like This” falls flat. The men in the collection are intrusively one-dimensional. The stabbing in “To Fill” doesn’t behoove the character.

Yet, in many ways, these flaws make the collection even more endearing. Reading authors like Chekhov and Steinbeck can wear you down. No matter how hard I try, I will never write their stories. Our experiences are too dissimilar. Lorrie Moore is an accessible writer and watching her experiment on the page excites my imagination, much like watching a swimmer try a new dive. You may end up with a few sore spots, or even a head wound, but that doesn’t keep you from jumping off the diving board.