Self-Help
The publication of "Self-Help" introduced readers to Lorrie Moore's refined blend of humor and insight, and made her one of the best-loved writers of her generation. These stories, told in a voice that is at once witty, melancholy, and bravely honest, paint a tableau of lovers and family, of loss and pleasure, desire and memory. From the young secretary who by day hopes someone will notice her Phi Beta Kappa key and by night makes love to a married man she met at a Florsheim shoe store, to the shattering of a marriage by the shores of a tranquil lake, "Self-Help" is a unique, enduring work of short fiction.
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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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