Hear
“Everyone should have a great love story with a magnificent lunatic at some point in their life,” he writes. Lorri Moore (New York, 1957) in his last novel If this is not my home, I don’t have a home (Seix Barral). It’s midday in Madison, Wisconsin, and the author connects to the Zoom meeting with LA NACION to talk about literature, pain, and the culture of cancellation. The sun enters through a side window and in the back of the room, frosted, appears a huge library. She lights up and illuminates a conversation with her humor, her sweetness and also her scathing view of the world. It is here where she writes and where she prepares her literature classes. one of the best American writers of all time, who was acclaimed on her trip to Argentina in 2019 to participate in the Buenos Aires International Literature Festival.
Although she is considered a master of the short story – her anthology of stories Complete stories (Seix Barral) is a volume of more than a thousand pages—he has also written novels, such as the endearing Who will take care of the frog hospital? (Eternal Cadence) and At the foot of the stairs (Seix Barral). After years of writing, in which she was “busy with many other things,” she returns with a novel about the reunion of Finn and Lily, who were a couple, loved each other, but her precarious mental health kept them apart, although not definitively. . Moore writes with humor, with intelligence, with poetry: “His memory of her was everywhere and nowhere; she an omniscient narrator.” The author also adds another plot line, located after the Civil War, in a story about loneliness, madness and fury.
-The protagonist of the novel, Finn, is a teacher. He teaches, like you, of course, he in high school and you, in the university. Has he, like Finn, lost faith in education?
-Not in the way Finn is. I needed to create a character who was skeptical of everything, even of any official story, so that when he was told that someone he loved had died, he wouldn’t believe it. For me, teaching has changed over time, because I’m getting older and the students are getting younger. I teach literature about the 20th century and they know very little about this period; on the other hand, they know a lot about the 21st century and I know nothing about this century. So we exchange ideas and information. I learn a lot from them.
-Which authors do you teach? William Faulkner, whom you quote in the epigraph of your novel? Carson McCullers? Alice Munro?
-I don’t teach William Faulkner or Carson McCullers. Very few teachers do that in the United States. There is a difficulty: they come from a particular era in the United States, and they are southern writers, and there are many young people who do not accept the translation of their vocabulary.
-For example, when do you use the term in your stories and novels? Nigger [hoy reemplazado, por ejemplo, por afroamericano]?
-Yes. That’s it. I love Faulkner, but I don’t teach him. I do teach Alice Munro, who I think was very influenced by Faulkner, in the same way that Toni Morrison was, too. I was very influenced by McCullers. I read her when I was young. Last semester I also taught Edward P. Jones, who could be thought of, in a way, as a Southern writer, because he portrays this population, and I think he’s on the same level as Munro. In a way, there’s something of Munro in him: a sense of time and structure, and both are in a kind of turf. Jones’s is that of the African-American migration from the South of the United States to Washington in the last century.
-When did you write this novel? The events take place in 2016, during the electoral contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
-It’s hard to say precisely because I wrote it over a period of years, while I was doing a lot of other things. I wouldn’t say it took me five solid years, but it took a lot of years. That’s the wonderful thing about a novel: you can have it in your drawer and in the meantime do other things; it’s a world you jump into when you want and you get out of it. A short story is more difficult, it doesn’t forgive you.
-Trump’s victory appears in the novel. Did he ever think that he would run for President again?
-In the book I write: “Nothing in the world ever really ended.” When I wrote this line I had a feeling that I might run for office again.
-There’s a soundtrack In your novel: Death Cab for Cutie, opera, The Beatles, Bob Dylan. Do you work with this concept in your literature? I mean the verses and the harmony of the songs to accompany the plot.
-No, but I should [risas]. Actually, the name Death Cab for Cutie was needed for the plot. And I also needed the mention of I Pagliacci. I hope readers know it, but if they don’t, nothing happens. It’s just that I love opera and I consider this novel to be an opera.
-There is tragedy, comedy, passion… but why specifically an opera?
-I think there are emotional confrontations, some characters who have small monologues, like the arias.
-I just mentioned Toni Morrison, and I think about Beloved, a novel that, I will not say why so as not to reveal elements of the plot of his book, has points in common with what lies beyond death. Are we connected to the afterlife?
-It’s impossible to say what happens after death. But in our dreams or when we think of someone, or even see the face of someone who has died in the crowd, I think these are moments when you can feel their presences, their voices. My sister and I constantly feel our mother’s voice in our heads.
-In your literature, the theme of illness, but also of healing, often appears. What do you find in this universe?
-Frankly, I never realized how much I write about illness, but when I stop and think about it, I do find that I do come back to this topic. I think there are many important stories to tell within these themes, revelations of personality. There is something particular that happens in contemporary life that can be brutal: technologies are better, but illnesses change all the time and so do treatments, so there are always stories to tell about how people deal with them. Fifteen years ago, Brown Medical School wanted to award me for writing about these topics.
-I know people who suffer or have suffered from illnesses, they read your stories and found some relief.
-Thank you very much for saying that. I have experienced illness, people I know who have been very ill. I never wanted it to be a recurring theme in my work.
-“I have many strange things to tell you about,” says a character. In this novel he ventures into the fantastic. How did this peculiar way of building a world come about, with two planes simultaneously?
-I try to tell my students to be free, not to get nervous or shut themselves in. I tell them to be themselves. At times I found myself running into walls and barriers, but I decided to push them aside in order to continue.
-Do you consider that there are thresholds, some very small, towards another dimension in our daily existence? Perhaps I am appealing to conceptions of the fantastic typical of Latin America.
-That’s funny. I know so many people from Latin America and Spain, and I understand what you mean. I think surrealism, because I don’t dare to talk about magical realism, is part of our reality. We encounter the incredible all the time. In this novel I included a car accident so that some readers would understand what comes next as a kind of hallucination, but I also wanted them to take what comes next literally. My model is The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy hits her head and then appears in Oz. Did she really go to Oz? Did she have this experience? I think we want her to have traveled there. In the end there is no difference because the story was there to be told.
-As a reader I don’t want the novel to end, because if the novel ends… again, it would reveal the plot. It builds a very powerful emotional tension. What happens to her while she writes these sad and poetic pages?
-I love my characters very much, I care a lot about them. I have invested a lot of time in them. It was very hard to write the ending of this novel.
-The fury also appears.
-Yes, there is. Finn doesn’t understand the suicide of a loved one. I remember when I found out that David Foster Wallace had killed himself in September 2008: “How is it possible that he did this… Obama is about to be elected President?” How stupid what I said. This is how disconnected we are from the pain and suffering of others.
-Did you know Foster Wallace?
-I saw him a couple of times. We were not friends, but we did talk about literature on the phone. Her death was a shock to me.
-We are living in a period of fervor around autofiction and literatures of the self. If I am not mistaken, you are not very fond of this movement.
-The presence of the author in the texts exists from Don Quixote, but that wasn’t called autofiction. I think that younger people who write autofiction—I’m not really sure who we’re talking about because everyone does it in a different way—must feel scared of invention. Nowadays there is a fear of entering another’s experience, but that is our task as writers: to imagine the life of someone other than ourselves.
-You talk about risks and fears. Are you afraid of being cancelled?
-I think I have been cancelled, but the good news is that it doesn’t last. I got in trouble for teaching Junot Díaz, who had been cancelled. I waited two years and added it to the program. Maybe it was too early. I have also written about the Sally Rooney show [Normal People] And I got into trouble on Twitter because millennials were telling me, “Don’t talk about us like that.” But I have a son that age…
-And the male protagonist is also a literature student like his students.
-Exact. I don’t know what’s happening in Argentina or Spain, but it seems in the United States that the force of cancel culture is beginning to diminish.
-What is your home? Where are you?
-I have a house and a son in Madison. I have a job and an apartment in Nashville. [enseña en la Universidad de Vanderbilt] And I have friends and family in New York. Wisconsin was once my home, but I feel at home in a lot of places these days, and at the same time, I don’t feel like Madison or Nashville or New York are my home. I have no roots. I don’t know anyone from the town where I grew up, and I haven’t been back.
-She builds homes with her literature. Her readers enter her pages into a Lorrie Moore territory, and there is a sense that nothing can go wrong, even when things are bad, there is always laughter and a sense of comfort.
-Thank you, that’s the way I feel when I write. I feel like the book I’m writing is my home.
