“I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME” by Lorrie Moore (Vintage Contemporaries, 208 pages, $18).
In a 2024 Q&A with The Guardian, Lorrie Moore makes two bold claims, the first regarding her appreciation for Miranda July’s novel “All Fours”: “Well, that’s what fiction is for — flawed but interesting women.” She goes on to assert: “I would never read literature for comfort. I would read literature for transport and for meeting a few people I would never want to meet in real life.”
Moore, the 2025 guest author in Chattanooga State’s Writers@Work program, has the bona fides to make such claims. Her work has been celebrated since her 1985 debut, the short-story collection “Self-Help,” which — not coincidentally — features plenty of flawed but interesting women. Her 1994 novel, “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?,” had Nick Hornby naming her “the best American writer of her generation,” and her latest, “I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In all her writing, readers will find characters they might never want to meet in real life.
Take, for example, Noel from the story “Real Estate,” collected in “Birds of America.” The story’s protagonist is Ruth, a woman who has survived both cancer and her husband’s many affairs with a brash and bitter laughter (more than two pages filled with just the word “Ha!”) and a certain resignation: “Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.” Noel is the lawn guy Ruth phones about the crows in their pear tree. He is also the guy who accidentally flicks a rubber band at his girlfriend’s chin during an argument, the guy who starts breaking into houses and robbing people at gunpoint and forcing them to sing because he is also a guy who somehow doesn’t know any songs.
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