3 Reasons To Read Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America

SEPTEMBER 9, 2003 BY SUSAN J

“Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed. “I’m a very average person,” she said desperately, somehow detecting that Charlotte already knew that, knew the deep, dark, wildly obvious secret of that, and how it made Sidra slightly pathetic, unseemly — inferior, when you got right down to it. Charlotte studied Sidra’s face, headlights caught in the stare of a deer. Guns don’t kill people, thought Sidra, fizzily. Deer kill people.”

From “Willing” in Birds of America.

“She had already — carefully, obediently — stepped through all the stages of bereavement: anger, denial, bargaining, Haagen-Daz, rage.”

From “Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens”

“Ray is dyslexic. When the roofing business slows in the winter months, instead of staying in with a book, or going to psychotherapy, he drives to cheap matinees of bad movies — ‘flicks’ he calls them, or ‘cliffs’ when he’s making fun of himself.

…

Ray must do his charade, which is Confucious.‘Okay. I’m ready,’ he says, and begins to wander around the living room in a wild-eyed daze, looking as confused as possible, groping at the bookcases, placing his palm to his brow. And in that moment, Therese thinks how good-looking he is and how kind and how strong and how she loves nobody else in the world even half as much.”

From “Charades”

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