On a chilly March evening in Toronto, I attended the International Festival of Authors to hear Lorrie Moore read from Bark, her latest collection of stories. The candlelit tables in the Brigantine Room at Harbourfront Centre welcomed hundreds of Lorrie Moore fans, all pumped, sharing tidbits from their favourite Lorrie Moore stories while waiting to see the award-winning author. Her work, it turns out, is an easy conversation starter with the power to break the ice between total strangers. I was tempted to ask the unfamiliar woman sitting next to me, “If you had to pick just one Lorrie Moore story to read every night before bed, continuously, non-stop for a year, which story would it be?” Lorrie Moore appeared on stage before I could ask. Flashing a disarming smile, she told the audience to take cell phone calls during the reading. Not a chance.
Moore read “Thank You for Having Me,” the concluding story in Bark in which the protagonist and her daughter attend a potluck country wedding, the second union of the daughter’s former babysitter. Sardonic and somewhat sad, the story is filled with jokey observations and characters who defy expectation. Here’s how she described the daughter in the story: “She was fearless: she had always chosen the peanut allergy table at school since a boy she liked sat there – the cafeteria version of The Magic Mountain.” How gorgeous is that?
Of course, nobody in “Thank You for Having Me” acts in the way that the reader would expect. Not the restless Brazilian babysitter wearing a white wedding dress the second time around, the bride’s first husband who is now serving as the best man or his father who is still brooding over the loss of his sexy daughter-in-law. Yet even their nuttiest actions are presented as acceptable, a reflection of Moore’s high tolerance for quirkiness. In this particular story, she writes, “Let a babysitter become a bride again. Let her marry over and over….let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way.”
Listening to Moore read, I felt like a smorgasbord of human irregularities was on offer. Take what you need, she seemed to be saying. So what if the protagonist had brought two Whole Food chickens to the wedding, accidentally cooked on Clean. Yes, the roasted chickens looked like road kill, but a taste of our errant ways may make us readers and writers stronger or, at the very least, funnier.