Self-Help
From the national bestselling author of A Gate at the Stairs—and a master of contemporary American fiction—comes “a funny, cohesive, and moving collection of stories" (The New York Times Book Review).
In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.
In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.
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Community Reviews
I really like the first story "How to Be an Other Woman," and I liked the use of the second person in it seemingly to communicate that the entire experience is a cliched one and frequently doomed in the same ways. But then she proceeded to use the second person for the subsequent stories and I grew weary of it and the perspective that other experiences were similarly cliche. Of course, I might have been misinterpreting. Finally, the last story is in the first person and is weird and sad and fun, though the reader pops up in the story briefly in the second person again, but it didn't seem like a necessary element so it felt a little cliched. In general, I approached reading the collection like homework, not something that I enjoyed returning to between stories.
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