Everyone is funny if you pay attention

The American author Lorrie Moore participated in this year’s Festivaletteratura to discuss Collected Stories, a compilation of all her short stories.

Moore organized the collection alphabetically rather than chronologically. She wanted to prevent readers from approaching the stories as a record of her development as a writer. She wanted to avoid the temptation to say, “Look how she has grown” or “Look how she has matured.” She questioned the assumption behind such a reading: What if I hadn’t grown or matured as a writer? By arranging the stories alphabetically, she placed works from different periods next to one another, sometimes bringing together stories that had never sat side by side before.

She found this arrangement both amusing and interesting, comparing it to a scrapbook or to looking through photographs of your children, with recent pictures placed next to very old ones. The alphabetical structure also allowed her to avoid imposing a particular reading order, leaving the reader free to create their own connections between the stories.

Moore emphasised the importance of sound and musicality in her writing. For her, a story is very much like a song: the writer needs to establish the voice, the tone, and the way the story is going to sound. Each line has its own rhythm, and the characters need to have distinctive and convincing voices. Short-story writing is particularly close to poetry and playwriting because sound is so crucial. This is especially apparent in dialogue, where the writing has to capture the rhythm and natural quality of people speaking.

When asked about autobiographical writing, Moore explained that she does not think of herself as writing autobiographically because she feels that she has to invent something new on the page. At the same time, she acknowledged that all writers are autobiographical to some extent: they inevitably incorporate into their work things that have caught their attention, moved them, or stayed in their memory. These personal details can enter a story in very small and unexpected ways. Moore, for example, has incorporated a friend’s dog, her sister’s shoes, and even dessert plates from a dinner party into her fiction. However, the finished story becomes something new.

Humour is a key element of Moore’s short stories. She sees humour as a way of releasing tension and believes that everyone is funny if you pay close enough attention. For Moore, humour is embedded in human nature itself. It emerges from the contradictions, awkwardness, and unexpected moments of everyday life, and paying attention to these moments allows them to become part of the story.