Author Lorrie Moore on her first novel in 14 years

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Author Lorrie Moore on her first novel in 14 years’

Lilah Raptopoulos
The other week we had my colleague Matt Vella on the show, the FT Weekend Magazine editor. And during our conversation he brought up a new novel coming out by one of his favourite authors. He was really excited about it.

Matt Vella
And it’s like a mystery about a therapy clown and an assassin or something like that. Cannot wait. I have never laughed out loud so much to the point of people around me worrying that maybe I was having a medical condition as (laughter) I have when I read her previous books.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Matt is talking about the new novel from the writer Lorrie Moore. It’s called I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, and if his description sounds wacky, it’s wacky. There is a therapy clown and an assassin. And at its core, it’s the story of a man taking a road trip with the animated corpse of his former lover. So it’s a love story, and it’s also a meditation on loss and grief. Lorrie herself has really been enjoying watching all of us try to describe this book.

Lorrie Moore
Somebody in the press called it “tender and gross”, (laughter) which I thought was funny.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Lorrie Moore
Because I hadn’t seen those two words put together before. But I thought, “Yeah, that’s probably right. It’s tender and gross”.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, it is. It is tender and gross. It’s somehow gruesome and beautiful at the same time.

Lorrie Moore
Well, that’s good. Gruesome and beautiful is probably what I was aiming for.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Lorrie Moore is one of the most esteemed short-story writers of our time. She’s known for sweeping, in just one paragraph, from impossibly funny to devastating, and back. Lorrie has been prolific over her 40-year writing career, but her fans have missed her. This is her first book of new literature in 10 years and her first novel in even longer. Today, she joins us to talk about it.

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This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

Lorrie, welcome to FT Weekend. It’s such a pleasure to have you.

Lorrie Moore
Oh, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I would love to start by just jumping into your new novel, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home. It is your first in 14 years and it’s been described as a horror comedy. But that doesn’t feel quite right to me. What would you say the book is about?

Lorrie Moore
Well, I would say it’s a love story and sort of a ghost story and sort of a metaphorical ghost story about things returning and things resurrecting themselves. It doesn’t really quite conform to any genre. So it’s a little genre-bending, I guess. But I think of it as primarily a kind of love story that’s sad, but there is comedy in it because the world has comedy in it and you just have to get that down. You can’t ignore it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s also a beautiful title.

Lorrie Moore
Oh, thank you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Can you tell me about choosing the title?

Lorrie Moore
Well, the title was my working title, and when I was using it, I thought of it as a sort of blues song title. You know, it does sound like, you know, like you could set it to music. Like, “I’m homeless if this is not my home”. But it also meant to embody or suggest people who are not quite comfortable in the world. And so it was really alluding to the spaces between life and death. It sort of announces a slight feeling of, “I’ve got to make the best of this because I have nowhere else.”

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Lilah Raptopoulos
The bulk of this novel is set in 2016, around the time of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. A pretty lonely high school teacher named Finn learns that his ex-girlfriend, Lily, has died by suicide. You realise that the book is magical realist when Finn finds Lily in a graveyard and he isn’t surprised to see her actively decomposing while she’s talking to him. She tells him she wants to be buried somewhere else. So they head off in his car.

The main character, Finn, is on a road trip with the corpse of his ex-lover who’s recently died. (Chuckles) And the way that you describe her body, she sounds sort of horrifying, but he’s not horrified. He’s very loving. And the road trip that they go on feels very sweet and intimate and funny. Sometimes they muse on life. Sometimes they hold each other. Sometimes they fight. I’d love to hear a little bit more about why you wanted to have a novel that centred around such a long interaction between the living and the dead or the living and the partial dead. 

Lorrie Moore
Well, I think that’s part of grieving and I think that’s part of losing someone that you go into kind of denial. I mean, many people speak of that after someone has died. They think they’ve seen them walking down the street.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Lorrie Moore
And so I wanted that slight ambiguity. I mean, I think neither one of them quite knows whether Lily is . . . whether she’s dead or not. And she says, “I guess I’m death-adjacent.”

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Lorrie Moore
But I did want to have somebody, so it would be Finn, grappling with someone he loved who had killed herself. And that can’t be resolved. And it isn’t really resolved in the book.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Lorrie Moore
Because he can’t quite understand that. And it is very hard in real life for people to understand. And she doesn’t quite bother to explain it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
She almost feels like it isn’t his . . . 

Lorrie Moore
. . . business.

Lilah Raptopoulos
. . . business. Yeah. 

Lorrie Moore
Right. Like that it’s her illness. It’s her thing. This is what she did, that he’s never gonna get it. But that’s part of what they’re doing on the road trip — trying to explore that a little bit.

Lilah Raptopoulos
There’s this, like, push-pull I felt to Finn’s grief that I wanted to ask you about. He feels like a guy who’s a little stubborn, and he felt a little stuck in the past to me. Like, he’s kind of unable to live in the reality of the present. And when he goes on this road trip with Lily, he leaves his real dying brother’s side to do it. Like, he leaves somebody who is actually not dead yet (chuckles) to go on this sort of, maybe, fantasy trip with this woman who has died. And I found that kind of sad. And it made me kind of wonder if that’s just what grief is, like it’s . . . does it reflect what a lot of us do when we’re grieving? We just kind of, like, can’t let go.

Lorrie Moore
It also reflects a little bit what love is, that love is a big distraction.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Lorrie Moore
That love doesn’t always lead to doing the right thing. Or at least romantic love. Or so, the most, so romantic love can be, you know, a boondoggle really, ethically and morally. And he, I think, comes to realise that sort of at the end.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. Another thing this novel explores is the importance of grey areas and why maybe we shouldn’t trust narratives that feel too clean or too black-and-white. Finn is partial to conspiracy theories and Trump is being elected in the background. So Finn’s paranoia sort of reflects the distrust many people had that year about what was real and what wasn’t.

You know, I also felt when I was reading the novel that there was this flow. Like, there were these places where Finn is comfortable with two conflicting things being true at once, like how his dying brother could want to live while his ex-lover wanted to die. Or he’s even comfortable, you know, hanging out with someone who is dead or alive at the same time. He even says all things are true at one point, but he also kind of reflects the way we don’t want it to be complicated. Like, we’d prefer reality to be something neat that we can control. We want to get why someone would want to die. We want to know if the moon landing really happened. We want to know someone’s dead and then mourn them and then move on in a kind of compact period of time. I don’t know. I imagine that’s something that you think about. I’m curious.

Lorrie Moore
Well, I think you’re right. And I think most histories or stories of anything give you a sort of, you know, a flat, objective account . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Easy to digest kind of.

Lorrie Moore
Right. And there, but there I think he likes to, I mean, he even says he wants his students to, you know, look around the corners of things. He doesn’t say there was never a moon landing. He’s just questioning the very first one, which went off without a hitch, and then all the other ones had problems. So he doesn’t quite . . . he doesn’t . . . It’s interesting that he doesn’t question any of the ones that have problems.

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) Right, right, right.

Lorrie Moore
He questions the one, the very first one that apparently had no problem. So he thought that’s suspicious. (Laughter) So he’s clearly thinking that reality is problems.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Lorrie Moore
And that if something doesn’t have problems, maybe there’s . . . maybe that’s not quite real.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. How do you think about that?

Lorrie Moore
The moon landing?

Lilah Raptopoulos
No. (Laughter)

Lorrie Moore
I think something with problems is real. I mean that . . . yeah. And if somebody has no problems, I think we’re probably not getting the full story.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Lorrie, this is your first novel in many years. And I imagine that whatever characters you choose in a novel, you’re committing to spend a lot of time with them in the writing process and these are quite sad people in some ways. I’m curious why you chose them.

Lorrie Moore
But you know, I suppose that came to me rather than my coming to them. I think of all my work as having a sort of downcast aspect. And of course I get accused of writing funny books (laughter) and there is humour always. As we were talking about, there’s always humour in the world, no matter how sad the story. But I thought I’m really gonna write something that’s really sad now (laughter) and it’s going to be about sadness, that’s going to be about grief and mourning.

I think at a certain age you start to know a lot of people who have died and you try to sort of figure out how do . . . how does one process this, that these people who you love so much are just gone? How can that be?

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Lorrie has written three other novels, and she’s also known for her many, many short stories. She’s been compared to writers like Chekhov and Alice Munro, and she’s a master of writing about the unsaid. Lorrie will observe small things in everyday interactions and then find just the right words and just the right cadence for them on the page.

It seems to me that in a lot of your writing, your characters can seem sort of frustrated with the limits of language, like they’re struggling with how to communicate with each other and they have witty banter, but they’re not always saying exactly what they mean sometimes, and that can be hard for them. And you’re such a lyrical writer. I almost feel you having fun with language in your writing. It’s one of my favourite things about your writing.

Lorrie Moore
Oh, thank you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m curious how you feel about language, if you feel that way.

Lorrie Moore
I do feel sometimes . . . It depends on what the situation is between the characters. But sometimes there’s a, you know, a kind of deliberate indirection. I do think people sometimes find it’s hard to say what they’d really like to say to someone. And I think in this novel with Finn and Lily, he postpones what he really wants to say until the end. But I think there’s a lot of postponing with relationships, don’t you? There are a lot of relationships you have in life where the thing you really want to say, you know, you can’t, you’re waiting for a moment when you can say it or a situation or some kind of conversation where this can be put in. But it may come, it may not.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. That’s true. A lot of life is holding back . . . 

Lorrie Moore
Holding back. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
 . . . Things that you’re not quite ready to say. (Chuckles)

Lorrie Moore
Right. Or the other person you’re quite sure is not ready to hear.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes, yes.

Lorrie Moore
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And sometimes the whole thing can seem so exhausting that (laughter) it’s easier not do it.

Has your relationship, or how has your relationship with language changed?

Lorrie Moore
I don’t know if my relationship to language has changed. I’ve always been interested in poetic language, and I’ve always been interested in dialogue. And I think both those things have been in my work from the beginning. I love getting characters in a room or in a space talking. And that comes from a love of theatre, I think. I love plays. And I love dinner parties because they’re like plays that you’re in.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s true. There’s a pitter-patter to a dinner party. There’s kind of a musicality.

Lorrie Moore
Yeah, and there can be tension. Just like in a play, there’s tension. And a dinner party, there can be tension. I always say when I’m at a dinner party where the tension starts to happen and someone tries to subdue it, I say, “No, the best dinner parties have a little bit of tension. Those are the ones that are memorable.” Now you don’t want, you know, it to go overboard, but a little tension is very revealing. It’s also what narrative artists do.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. We recently interviewed Georgi Gospodinov on the show.

Lorrie Moore
Oh, I love him. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, he recently wrote the International Booker and he talked about voice in his writing like it we- . . . he was sneaking poetry into his prose because people don’t buy poetry anymore. And it was his way of being a poet. (Laughter) And you know, there’s this musicality to your voice that’s so strong. And there’s sort of a cadence and a rhythm to it, as you were saying.

Lorrie Moore
Oh, thank you. Thank you for saying that, because I do hear it that way. I do. You know, he and I were fellows at the Cullman Center when I was researching this book.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, wow. You were working on your books at the same time.

Lorrie Moore
Yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So do you feel the way Georgi does? Like, I’m curious mostly about the musicality of your writing. Are you hearing it as you’re writing it?

Lorrie Moore
Yes, yes. It’s not a sound I can reproduce by reading it out loud. There are many writers who read their work out loud and then they can hear it. That’s not what I’m writing to. So when I’m reading aloud, I’m often hearing something that’s different from what I’m actually aiming for. I’m aiming for something that my inner ear, my mind’s ear, hears. And so it’s probably a musical kind of ear, and I am writing to that ear.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You know, Lorrie, your work is so beloved. And in 2020, Everyman published an edition of your Collected Stories. Very beautiful one. And it’s an honour usually reserved for dead writers. (Laughter)

Lorrie Moore
I felt a little dead, I’d have to say. (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
I was wondering, what was that like? Like, how do you kind of place that?

Lorrie Moore
It felt a little posthumous. (Laughter) And I thought, I’m not dead yet. I really have other books and I’m gonna show them I have other things. And so this, here I am.

Lilah Raptopoulos
My last question, Lorrie, is just what are you thinking about now? Like, what’s rolling around in your mind creatively? Are there themes that you’re thinking about for the next project? What are you willing to share?

Lorrie Moore
Well, I just spent four months in Berlin, and so I have a Berlin-themed narrative that I’m thinking about. And so that will be my next piece of narrative. Now, whether it will be long or short, I don’t know. But it was really a fantastic experience to be there for four months. What a tragic and unusual city it is in terms of history. And it wasn’t something I had really given a lot of thought to, but I’m giving a lot of thought to it now.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Lorrie, thank you. This has been a real honour.

Lorrie Moore
Oh, well, thank you for having me on. That’s great.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the Life and Arts podcast of the Financial Times. A few relevant links are in the show notes. And just so you know, every link that you click there that goes to FT.com will get you past the paywall. If you want to explore more of our website, we have really great trial and subscription offers. Those are at ft.com/weekendpodcast. Make sure to use that link.

As you know, we really love hearing from you. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. The show is on Twitter @ftweekendpod, and I am on Instagram and Twitter, but mostly on Instagram talking to you @lilahrap.

Next week we are talking to my colleague Henry Mance about what it takes to fight wildfires and he learned a lot, and the field is changing and is fascinating.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Special shout-out this week to Lulu Smyth. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.

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