College & Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore is a writer I enjoy having my heart broken by. In college I read her collection of short stories, Birds of America. I remember that one of the stories in that collection is about a baby who develops cancer and has to go to baby chemotherapy. Another story is about a woman who drops another woman's baby at a backyard grill-out and the baby dies. Now, in my new class at Hamline whose title I can never remember, we are reading Moore's collection titled "Self-Help". An exceprt from the story "How to Become a Writer":

You spend too much time slouched and demoralized. Your boyfriend suggests bicycling. Your roomate suggest a new boyfriend. You are said to be self-mutilating and losing weight, but you continue writing. The only hapiness you have is writing something new, in the middle of the night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has seen yet. You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius. Understand what you must do. The kids in your nursery project will be disapointed, but you have a calling, an urge, a delusion, an unfortunate habit. You have, as your mother would say, fallen in with a bad crowd.

I knew a professor at St. Olaf who went to college with Lorrie Moore. I once asked her what Moore was like and the professor smiled and said, "Beautiful, just beautiful."