Lorrie Moore: ‘I would never read literature for comfort’ | Lorrie Moore

My earliest reading memory
Probably The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum, read to me when I was perhaps three. It is very different from the movie and so was my first introduction to distortions and improvements in screen adaptations, and buried treasure in original texts. The mouse queen in the book completely enchanted me and of course is nowhere in the film.

My favourite book growing up
Nine Days to Christmas by Marie Hall Ets and Aurora Labastida, a story of a star-shaped piñata that becomes an actual star in the sky. I suppose it’s about death and eternal life, and magic and grief. It felt powerfully, wonderfully sad to me, though the end involves a kind of resurrection which perhaps through my tears I wasn’t buying.

The book that changed me as a teenager
Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner. I read it when I was 13, so when it first came out. It was amazing and intimate, and took me into a world I knew nothing about yet by the end I felt very close to. Meriwether died less than a year ago, at the age of 100. I hope she made some money from that book. If it reached me way up in the Adirondacks, it must have reached a lot of people.

The writer who changed my mind
Hmmmm. Not sure. Janet Malcolm’s book The Silent Woman, about the Hughes estate and Sylvia Plath, offers much sympathy for Ted Hughes, which I didn’t have a lot of before. It doesn’t throw Plath under the bus but it almost perversely looks at Hughes through a sisterly eye.

The book or author I came back to
Alice Munro’s stories always reveal something additional that you’d forgotten or perhaps even missed the first time. Also all work that you read later is different because you, the older reader, are different.

The book I discovered later in life
This doesn’t really answer your question since, of course, I’ve yet to hit “later in life”. But there are sometimes books you have to take a couple of runs at in order for them to work their magic on you. Years ago Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient was like that for me. And more recently, Jayne Anne Phillips’s The Night Watch. Both are magnificent novels. Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is a little like that for me too. I often find Chekhov’s plays strange and elusive, and then suddenly one particular moment illumines them.

The book I am currently reading
I recently read Enter Ghost – an impressive novel by Isabella Hammad that uses a production of Hamlet to look at a few of the many things it means to be Palestinian. A film I saw recently, Ghostlight, used an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet as psychodrama to try to understand teen suicide. A father whose son has killed himself is drafted to play Romeo and we are made to see him entering this death-bent mindset in the Capulet tomb scene. Shakespeare used in unorthodox ways is always interesting to me. Totally to one side of that is Miranda July’s arguably misogynistic sex comedy All Fours. The only appealing or admirable characters are the men! Yet most of the nutty drama is happening with the flawed but interesting women: well, that’s what fiction is for – flawed but interesting women. I couldn’t put it down. It has a dash of Der Rosenkavalier in it, especially in its ending.

My comfort read
Cook books. I scarcely cook, but I love reading recipes and imagining the whole thing. A kitchen full of delicious smells. I would never read literature for comfort. I would read literature for transport and for meeting a few people I would never want to meet in real life.