How to Interpret Moore

“How” by Lorrie Moore, like many of the stories in Self Help, is told in second person. Four stories in Lorrie Moore’s collection have titles which begin the word “How.” This particular story is only the single word “How,” and seems to be a generalization of many hows. How to break up with a boyfriend, how and where to find that boyfriend, how a family wedding will turn out. By using the pronoun “you,” Moore familiarizes the narrator with the reader, and even puts the reader into the narrator’s shoes. We experience the unnamed narrators experience right alongside her.

            Lorrie Moore crafts the story “How” like a create your own adventure. “Begin by meeting him in a class, in a bar, at a rummage sale.” Moore leaves the choice wide open to the reader. The boyfriend we choose may “manage a hardware store” and we may have met him “in a bar.” As the story goes on, we are presented with less and less options. The narrator stops giving three options and rather uses words like “perhaps” to express the boyfriend might have done or said something a certain way. Instead of options, we are presented with commands that we have to follow. The story starts very general and becomes less like a choose your own adventure, and there becomes a sense of inevitability as the story progresses. As the reader, we get the sense that no matter how the boyfriend says, “what is your reason” when the narrator breaks up with him, the phrase or action will mean the same thing. No matter what you choose at the beginning, or how the narrator and the reader meet the boyfriend, the story will culminate in the same ending. The narrator and the reader will leave the boyfriend and somewhat awkwardly see him later.

            How do we reach this point? Lorrie Moore has explored multiple personalities of loved ones so far in Self Help. In “What is Seized,” the reader is presented with a man who is as cold as ice. Contrastingly, in “How” Moore provides a man who is described to be warm much like a “hearth.” The cold man is witty, calculating, emotionless, and smart. The warm man is much less worldly, cultured, and smart, but he is loving, easy-going, and charming. We see the cold man loses his girlfriend, because he is emotionless. The warm man in “How” loses the narrator by trying too hard. Every strategy the narrator uses to distance herself from the boyfriend, the boyfriend attempts to infiltrate and make himself apart of her book reading and play going, effectively pushing the narrator farther away. There becomes another layer to the how. How a warm man will attempt to be a part of all the facets of your life.

            The narrator is somewhat of an allegory for the cold man, and her boyfriend can be compared to the cold man’s wife. Everything the cold human suggests, the warm jumps happily to do, to please, to find love behind a wall of ice. How do we break the ice? The narrator finds herself distancing herself from her boyfriend and not really feeling many emotions for him, except the occasional annoyance and the hope that he dies from discolored urine. This is dark. She feels little, he feels a lot. She is colder and calculating, he is more warm, charming, spontaneous, and goofy. The cold and warm have flip-flopped genders and they do not have kids, but the story arc is somewhat similar.

            The “How” from this story bridges a broad range of questions, relationships, cold vs. warm humans, break ups, weddings, etc. The list could probably go on forever. Lorrie Moore’s how to guide offers a range of self-help stories, but they are oddly specific. Taking the reader on a journey rather than truly helping them with an issue. Using the self-help style of writing effectively draws the reader and makes us a part of the story, an effect I am beginning to really enjoy. I am excited to keep reading about Moore’s character and to see where they lead us.