Like Life
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the national bestselling author of Birds of America comes “a brilliant collection” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) of eight exquisite stories of men and women stumbling through their daily existence.
In Like Life, Lorrie Moore’s men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can’t quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a Midwest mall. Dennis, unhappily divorced, buries himself in self-help books about healthful food and healthy relationships. One prefers to speak on the phone rather than face his friends, another lets the answering machine do all the talking. But whether rejected, afraid to commit, bored, disillusioned or just misunderstood, even the most hard-bitten are not without some abiding trust in love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nobody is having a good time in Moore's ( Self-Help ) wondrously witty second collection of short stories. Her characters may live above the urban rot but fumes rise from the gutter and out of the drain pipes. The problem: there is no passion in Moore's world of ``like lives'' (as opposed to love lives), where romantic partings are all too common, children get misplaced, ``Dear John'' messages are habitually left on phone machines, and marriages endure mainly because discontented wives cannot find affordable apartments of their own. Millie, 51 and hopelessly maternal, in ``Places to Look for Your Mind,'' is a whiz at recycling leftovers, but not at finding a meaningful use of her time and talents. In ``Two Boys'' Mary escapes the demands of her difficult boyfriends (one ``claimed to be separating'' from his wife, the other ``sweated all over her'') by visiting the park, dressed in white--only to be spat on by an 11-year-old wearing green lipstick. In ``You're Ugly, Too'' Zoe flees the results of an ominous sonogram to dress up for a high-rise Halloween party. With gallows humor and unfailing understanding, Moore evokes her characters' quiet desperation and valiant searches for significance.
