Moore's Endings and How to Get Help

I really enjoyed Self-Help by Lorrie Moore and getting to experience new styles of narration. While some of her 2nd-person narrations did feel a little experimental, I didn’t find that the style distracted from the story at any point. On the whole, narrating in 2nd person made it harder to judge any of the characters even when they were doing morally questionable things (such as cheating on people), because the reader experienced it as “you,” forcing the reader to see themselves as the troubled character. In some of the stories, such as “How,” the plot is presented at first almost like a choose-your-own-adventure story, with options for what occupation you have or what dates you might go on. I found this style could be occasionally annoying, but it was effective in adding a sense of loneliness or detachment, like these details didn't matter. All the weird narrative formats, including "How to Talk to Your Mother," told going backwards in time, made Self-Help a unique and refreshing read and I was generally very impressed by Lorrie Moore's writing.

Self-Help works extraordinarily well as a collection, in my opinion, playing on similar themes throughout the book of insecurity, emotional instability, self-reflection, and feeling trapped. All of Moore’s characters feel in some way stuck in their situation, whether it be in a relationship with a dishonest man, on a deathbed surrounded by people who question her, or in a domestic life and low-status job that has her feeling suffocated and yearning for a more ambitious life. Another common element of Moore’s stories is the humor--a major feature in all of them. While the stories often deal with rather dark subject matter and many of the characters seem to struggle with Depression or deal with other losses in their lives, the sort of morbid humor, puns, and other ridiculous jokes exist in such a presence that the loaded situations the characters are in end up being less emotional than we might expect. A lot of the humor comes from the sort of awkwardness/clumsiness that many of the women in these stories seem to have (one of the best examples perhaps being the line on the bus about book bindings). I like to relate this humor back to the epigraph (“The purpose of this book is to direct attention to the ways in which non-backboned animals reproduce,” etc.) which I think perfectly captures the subtle humor and the serious but strangely laughable tone Moore is going for. Even so, the humor in this book also makes some of the content more depressing to me because the witty, sarcastic humor sometimes feeds into negative thoughts and self-deprecation. It makes some of the characters seem as though they’ve lost some of their capacity to feel or express emotion, or that the only way they can cope with their situation is to try and laugh about it.

The story “To Fill” stood out to me as being pretty different from the others in the collection and I think it is a fitting end. For one thing, though the entire book is about women struggling through hard times and dealing with their own minds and ambitions and needs for love, independence, etc., this is the first time a character actually has a breakdown and seems to really hit rock bottom. She stabs her husband and is taken away from her child and it’s a very bleak outlook for this character. However, because of this breakdown there’s actually more hope in this story that a better future may come for her than in any of the other stories, where the problems are confined to the character’s mind and they are left alone to hope these feelings will slowly dissipate. In “How,” for example, the ending is the woman finally leaving her ill husband and walking off feeling guilty and a little ashamed, even if the choice was right for her. “A week, a month, a year. The sadness will die like an old dog. You will feel nothing but indifference… One of those endings” (Moore 64). In “How to be an Other Woman,” she is left alone, pretending to be okay when her ex-lover calls her on the phone. “Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity,” (Moore 21). Even “How to Become a Writer” ends with the character quitting her job, wondering what her purpose in life is, and describing her love life as an occasional “date with a face blank as a sheet of paper” (Moore 126). The endings aren’t always necessarily tragic, but they all lack a sense of fulfillment and feel more restless, making me a little nervous for the mental/emotional state of the main character. However, in “To Fill” there is actually a somewhat optimistic tone to the ending, with the woman potentially able to get treatment, and at the very least able to see her son again. It’s still not happy, but to me it’s more hopeful that any of the other stories.

I’m not entirely sure what the significance of this story--that hits rock bottom and then reaches a new high--being at the end is, but I think there’s something that could be said about trying to keep emotions to yourself and survive only through “self-help” as opposed to letting others take care of you a bit. The women in these stories have so many thoughts and feelings that they all almost go crazy because it’s too much confusion to sanely handle in one mind, and they need a way to let it out. While clearly stabbing your husband isn’t the accepted way to do that, by writing all these stories on women who are stuck, I think Moore is letting people know that they aren’t alone in having these feelings, and that sometimes you can’t get through everything by yourself. Sometimes you need to stop and get help. Yet many of Moore's women are fiercely independent or needing to get away from people, so I don’t know if that’s really what Moore is going for theme-wise, maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but that’s something I interpreted from her work.