Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

I don't usually choose to read short stories. They remind me of reading assignment in school where we had a huge literature anthology that included poems, essays, and short stories all bound together. I only remember The Lottery; the rest are forgotten. Give me a nice juicy novel to get lost in any day!

My book club reads novels and non-fiction, and to my knowledge, they have never read a book of short stories. So I proposed this one not having read it and only knowing that it gets great reviews. And it was supposed to be funny. I love funny. But when I read a review and I heard what the stories were about........ a woman who accidentally killed a baby, a couple finds out their young son has cancer..... I thought that there could be no way that this book has humor. I was so wrong! I can't begin to count the number of times I laughed out loud one minute and nearly cried the next.

Here's just a little example:

"Where am I from?" Agnes said it softly. "Iowa." She had a tendency not to speak up.
"Where?" The woman scowled, bewildered.
"Iowa," Agnes repeated loudly.
The woman in black touched Agnes's wrist and leaned in confidentially. She moved her mouth in a concerned and exaggerated way, like a facial exercise. "No, dear," she said. "Here we say O-hi-o."

Lorrie Moore is my new hero, and I'm determined to read everything she writes. She lives just miles from here in Madison, and I want to be her best friend. I have always had a quirky sense of humor, but so does Lorrie, so I know we could get along. She is a fabulous writer who can pack so much into just one or two sentences.

Here's a quote from one story about infidelity:

Holding fast to her little patch of marital ground, she’d watched as his lovers floated through like ballerinas, or dandelion down, all of them sudden and fleeting, as if they were calendar girls ripped monthly by the same mysterious calendar-ripping wind that hurried time along in old movies. Hello! Good-bye! Ha! Ha! Ha! What did Ruth care now? Those girls were over and gone. The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.

Please read this, BT. I could hear you laughing with me as I read this and I want to know you really are. - June