This Month In Books, October 2009: Lorrie Moore’s “Self-Help” (short story collection) + The Chairs’ “No Fingers”

The Chairs – No Fingers

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Exercise patience and wade past “No Fingers’” opening 10 seconds of fuzz. “It’s worth it” would be an understatement.

Next up on this month’s list of books is Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help. In short, do not trust this collection of stories; it will kill you. So many of her tales deal with loss, senility, and decomposition, it’s no wonder Moore crafted what amounts to a cookbook’s antithesis, illustrating not how good lives are baked, but rather how some people go about stomaching the crumbling pastries muddying their lives. Especially family.

Two pieces in particular, “How to Be an Other Woman” and “Go Like This,” are outright works of brilliance, their incisive humor supplemented by the rigidness of Self-Help’s instruction-manual storytelling format.

From “How to Be an Other Woman:”

When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

Moore’s starkness borders on heart-wrenching even when capped by wit.

I have lain. In bed. So many nights. Thinking of how it would be when I told him. And plotting, ruminating, remembering the ways our bodies used to love each other, touch, waltz. Now my body stands in the corner of the gym by the foul lines and extra crepe paper and doesn’t get asked to dance at all.
- Lorrie Moore, “Go Like This”

As for The Chairs, honestly, I debated not writing about the track at all (although it is my favorite of theirs), because its softest word — the last one! — is omitted. “Go.” They tacked it onto the beginning of the next track as a type of sound bridge between the two.

“No Fingers” simply fits Moore’s collection all too well.

Once you’ve braved the song’s remorse-laden waters, walked until you’re chin-deep, gingerly testing the seabed one tiptoe at a time, becoming Bobbing Nose And Eyes, and wondering whether the next step will be the one that finds your hair lapping at the ocean’s surface, you learn to trust it. You rub the salty sting of minor-chord-piano from your eyes and stand.

There lies a sandbar ahead where waves lick gently at your ankles, where the words “I want my time back” have no place, where your children understand if you have to, and where you understand if he has to, and your mother dies peacefully before asking who you are and what you’re doing at her bedside wiping the spittle from her nightgown.

There lies a shoal ahead. There has to.

[Buy Lorrie Moore's Self-Help, The Chairs' Website]