Poured Over: Lorrie Moore on I am Homeless if This is Not My Home

By Jenna Seery / June 20, 2023 at 6:00 am

“Does one ever move on from someone they love dying?”

Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a story of love, family, life and death, written with the unmistakable wit and humor her readers cherish. Moore talks with us about her distinct authorial voice, balancing humor and grief, the difference in reviewing television and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over. We end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Madyson and Jamie.   

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.  

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.       

Featured Books (Episode):
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Feature Books (TBR Topoff):
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I’ve been reading Lorrie Moore for, well, a while. And every single book has been an absolute delight for me. And I’m so happy she’s here. Because this new book, I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home, we’re going to dance around some of this book and I’m smiling like a mad woman, as I think about it. It is 192 very tight pages. It’s two storylines. It is really terrific character. I love these characters. I love Elizabeth. I love Finn. I love Lily, Max, all of them. And then we have an unnamed actor that we’re going to get to as well. But Lorrie, thank you so much for joining us on pored over it’s such a pleasure to see you.

Lorrie More
Oh, thank you for having me. It’s very it’s very fun to be here.

MM
I Am Homeless, If This is Not My Home is your first book in a bit. I mean, it’s been a while. When did you start working on this new book? I feel like you’ve been hinting at it sort of over the last few years saying, well, I’m working on this thing.

LM
I’m working on this weird thing. I did research for the Coleman Center in New York, I had a fellowship 2017-2018 I think that was. I had begun a little bit of it before, but I needed I needed time to do it.

So the two storylines— we’ve got this fellow called Finn who’s driven in from the Midwest to the Bronx, his brother is in hospice and he’s come specifically to see his brother. And Finn also has, I guess we call her former girlfriend, Lily.

I guess it’s a former girlfriend.

Yeah, they seem to have been a little broken up at this point.

But they’re kind of broken up. He’s not, he’s still very much emotionally involved. He’s not over it and she might not be over it either.

I don’t think she is either. But yeah, then we have a second storyline, though that set in the American South in, you know, post-Civil War, but certainly not present day.

Think there’s one little sentence that gives the year away? I think it’s about 80 to 87. But you know, around there.

So we’ve got Elizabeth writing letters to her sister in that period. And then we have essentially Finn and Lily in the present day. How did we get these two storylines in this project?

That is an excellent question. It’s a question my editor at Knopf asked me straight off when I sent in a manuscript. And so I had to sort of explain things and I had to, to redo a couple things. Both these stories were in my head, and, and then I realized I had things in common, and I knew that you could do a contemporary story with an historical one. Many authors have done that and there can be overlap. And I thought of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, which, you know, is that house, you know, dramas that are occurring centuries apart, are still simultaneously within that house. And so I thought I would steal that apparently, Tom Stoppard stole it from someone else. So I, you know, I heard him say that in an interview, so I thought, Okay, well, I won’t feel guilty. I guess you think he said it was some classic thing in theater, that you use the house, and you have, you know, time differential with the two dramas that are occurring within it. So I decided that these stories had things in common, they had communion with the dead, they both had a kind of ne’er do well guy named Jack. And they had this boarding house in common, and some other things, and I decided I could go back and forth. And you know, with luck, make it clear that that there are connections between these two stores.

I’m going to take a second and quote you quoting Alice Munro, something I stumbled across in the essay collection while I was prepping for the show, love never dies. And there’s a lot of love in this book. There’s familial love, there’s sibling love, there’s romantic love. There’s all sorts of love in this book, right? And you write about siblings in a really cool way.

It’s something I noticed, only when I was completing this novel, that there’s siblings in all of them. And there’s also protagonists who are carried away by a slightly imaginary love in all my novels, and I didn’t even realize that until I thought, well, what does that mean? And I just couldn’t go there. But it’s somehow a sense of, of love as a distraction from filial bonds and duty, and all of that I have to say about the Alice Munro quote, I can’t remember which story that is in, but she has the character say, love dies all the time. You know, she responds to what she says that’s the sort of stupid thing people think is true, but it’s not. It’s not. And yeah, in this novel love— it’s true, love doesn’t die.

There are so many fun moments in this book. And I knew the book was coming. And I got the galley. And I read it cold because it had been a while since I had anything sort of super new to read for me. And the essay collection was fun. But this book is even more fun. Boy, this book is wild. It’s so great.

A little bonkers. Yeah, I knew it. I didn’t show it to anyone when I was writing it. Because I thought no one’s going to get it. And so I mean, I waited until I finished it to turn it in. And then I tinkered with it a little bit after, but I didn’t I mean, it’s the first time I’ve written a book and not shown anyone during the process. So that’s when you really know you’re in crazy land that other readers are not going to get what you’re doing until you have finished it. And then with luck, they will.

And you’ve had the same agent and the same editor for every single book. Okay, so you didn’t even show them, and they’ve known you for a really long time.

I showed them once I had a draft. And then I did make some changes afterwards, I had what I thought of as a finished draft. And then I turned that in and they had responses. And I made some changes. But usually, I show it to a couple writer friends and they tell me if there’s something really wrong here. But I didn’t I didn’t do that this time,

Because there’s a lot of what I consider Lorrie Moore, writer, in this book, I mean, the dialogue is great. The humor is there. There’s so much payoff in this book, there’s so much good, funny, Lorrie Moore wit, in this book, even though I can’t stop thinking about it. But I also can’t stop laughing because you pulled it off entirely. And I know people are going to be listening to the show thinking what is going on. And all I want to say is it’s 192 pages, you can read it very quickly. And you’ll fly through the story and all of the things I think of when I think of your short stories, the way you describe what’s happening in this world, and what’s happening between Finn and Max and Finn and Lily, and Elizabeth and her sister and Elizabeth and her gentleman border, the actor who’s staying in her boarding house. I know, you said this book feels really wild. And yes, I would not disagree with you. And yet, when did you decide that this was the project that this that you were just going to commit completely to this idea.

I suppose when I was at the Coleman Center I I mean, I never set out to write an historical novel. But as I did the research, and as I had this other story of grief in my head, I thought these stories of grief are really speaking to each other in some way. Maybe all stories of grief, speak to one another. And so, I mean, at the Coleman Center, I did the historical research, and I did way too much research. The way I just suddenly thought I want to come back as a historian in my next life. I did more research than I used. It was very interesting. And you know, some of the research is in there. And I wanted the back and forth between present day will say and present-day politics, 2016 it’s the election of Trump and I thought you know, the idea of the Confederacy never die is in both parts. So I had both things going on. Now I wrote them pretty much the way they appear in the book. I didn’t write the letter separately and intersperse them. I really did exactly as it was to be read, which might be a little weird. It’s certainly not very David Mitchell of me.

You gave Elizabeth a really great line now and talking about everything that you just mentioned. It does seem this place has been handed some moment in history that’s grown fearful and impulsive about hanging on to it. And I was just kind of like, Oh, hi. And that’s very early. That’s early. It’s possibly her second or third section in the book and I just thought okay, I’m in, I was already in from her first letter to her sister but and then we meet Finn and Max. And then I was like, Oh, I’m really, really I need to see what’s going on.

Well, that’s great. I’m so I’m so happy to hear you say that. Because when there are so many sections, often people prefer one to another. And when they have to move on to another section, they miss the other one, or I don’t know, there can be preferences in any kind of bicameral narrative, or even within a single narrative. If there’s if there’s things, themes, relationships that you are more attached to than others, you can think that the whole thing is unbalanced. But I hope it all works as an assemblage, I’ll say.

I wanted to know how you were going to connect everything. That’s what I really needed to know. I was like, okay, I see the parallels, but I really needed to know how you were going to bring this together. There are other writers who would have brought it together in a different way, or maybe never would have come up with any. But when you brought it together too, I was so pleased. I figured it was either going to connect in a physical way, or an emotional way. And you actually gave me both.

I hope, I hope— Oh, good. Thank you. I hope there’s both I mean, there is one moment where Elizabeth when she’s handing over the dead body will say then there’s a couple of dead bodies in the book.

Yes there are.

She says, well, it’s a bit of a custom in these parts to drive around the countryside with a dead body. And in your vehicle, of course, As I Lay Dying is the reference point there. And I have a little quote at the beginning, I use a quote as an epigraph, from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. So there in both sections, there is that that driving around with someone who may or may not be dead may or may not be who you think they are. So there’s that parallel.

I’m going to go back and this was an excuse to sort of jump back into some of my favorite Lorrie Moore stories and Real Estate is one of those stories from Birds of America. And if you haven’t read the story, I’m just going to say go read it, you can either find it in Birds of America, or it’s in the collected stories, which was reissued in 2020 with a fabulous introduction by Lauren Groff. So either of those, because I’m not going to spoil the book for you. But what I am going to say is, there’s a description of the art of fiction and the purpose of fiction that shows up in Real Estate. This is the kind of thing that fiction is it’s the unlivable life, the strange room tacked on to the house, the extra moon that’s circling the Earth, unbeknownst to science, just like, well, yes, this is exactly what you’re doing in this book. It is so much fun. And yeah, I did follow you down the rabbit hole. And I wasn’t entirely clear what was going on maybe in the first couple of sections, and then I started to put it together, because the voice is so good. And it matches each of the sections, even though one is you know, clearly historical and one is present, the voice matches, there’s that sort of raised eyebrow to the world. I think each narrator both Elizabeth and Finn sort of have this unreliable streak, you know, the idea of balancing the voice so that you’re not giving more weight to one piece, because the two need each other. The two sections, the two storylines need each other, I think.

Yeah, I agree. Thank you for saying that. I mean, you know, not every reader will have that experience with one voice and either prefer that or prefer the next one that comes along. But they alternate. So if you if you keep going through the book, they’re both there. Yeah, the one is in first person because ladders and the other is close third tracking the hapless Finn. I was telling someone I have to I have colleagues who have you know, after I started this book, I was very attached to these names fan and lengthy and two of my colleagues, poet’s got dogs, one of them named Finn and the other one named Lily. And I just thought, oh, no, I can’t deal with these dogs named Finn and Lily and also write characters. But I was too far into the novel to change the names. So now I have to go back to Nashville. And of course, deal with these dogs.

I do want to talk about the humor though, because I think, especially when you’re writing about grief and death, humor is something that people sometimes forget. I mean, it’s that valve too, right? It’s the pressure valve for any human being has experiencing any of that, but also I can’t separate you from this very sort of dry, witty, like, your dialogues still just sings. And in this book, there a couple of moments where I was laughing out.

Well, good, I did think of it is all very sad and not a funny book necessarily. There are always funny things in life, you don’t really even have to make them up, you just have to pay attention, they’re just there. And for the dialogue for, for the brothers, and for Finn and Lily— I mean, they’re in close quarters, they’re in impossible circumstances. And so there will be, there would be tension. And there would be, there would be humor, there’s always some humor in hospice, there’s always some humor in in a, on a car trip. And that’s just the way people are because everybody’s trying to cheer each other up. Now, there’s also other stuff in there, just dialogue, but it is how people speak. I think I notice everyone being funny all the time. So I did want to capture that it gets a little unfunny, maybe toward the end, but it needs that too. It needs to have a kind of…

I know the moment you’re talking about and that particular exchange. I think it shows a real sort of sea change in Finn. There’s something he says to another person where you’re like, oh, oh, but here’s the thing. I know what he says. And I know who he says it to. And I don’t know if it’s going to stick. Because that’s one of the things about Finn where I’m like, is this going to stick? I mean, Finn’s very sort of focused on Finn and his life and his interpretation of life. And I’m like, I would like to think that Finn might be able to move on, but I’m not sure I trust him.

Who knows? I mean, does one ever move on from someone they love dying? Sort of yes, sort of no. And that’s, that’s what the book is, it’s sort of, it’s like, here’s the partial way, you move on, here’s the partial way, you don’t move on. And so it’s existing in that sort of Nether zone. It’s also a little bit of, I mean, to the extent that Finn is a little self-absorbed, it’s about his non comprehension of her mental state, which is a mystery. I mean, I think the kind of mental suffering that she has is a mystery to others, and you can never really quite get to the bottom of it, even if you love them, dearly, can’t really fathom it. And he brings his non comprehension all the way through the book. He doesn’t ever reach a, I mean, he, he touches on some understandings here and there, but mostly, he’s got his rageful non comprehension that is driving him. And so And sometimes that’s part of the comedy and the tension and, and the dialogue and, and sometimes it’s just part of the sadness,

I genuinely believe that we experience life sort of, in a balance of emotions, right? Like, you can’t have joy if you don’t have sadness, because you have nothing to compare it to. And that’s, you know, when I’m reading your work, really specifically, the stories but certainly the new novel, certainly I look to you to be able to write raise an eyebrow at stuff where I know some people might not have the same response that I’m having, but there’s an honesty to what you’re saying and how you’re saying it that I so appreciate and maybe that just says I have really black sense of humor. Well, they might reader, it might be my very dark sense of humor, but the idea that you know, you have to have all of the stuff in order to have life right the question is, do we have the language to represent all of the stuff as we experience it?

Sometimes if you just put those different levels of language down and ask them to sort of smash into each other? You can, both the comedy and the tragedy occur. I actually have a have great admiration for stand up. And I was I was watching, Wanda Sykes is new special, and I don’t think it’s as great as are other ones. But there’s a moment that just had me laughing out loud and it’s she’s trying to be a guy who is going through the hot flashes of menopause. While he’s just imagining this she’s creating, while he gives the quarterly earnings report in a company meeting. So it’s, it’s so it’s like, he’s got the PowerPoint figures and the graphs and all and the corporate language going on at the same time. She’s made up a language for male menopause that he’s also suffering from. So the collision of those two rhetorical levels, that’s what’s so funny. And she does that she did that very, very well. I just had great admiration for that. But that’s and so that’s also sometimes the definition of, of surrealism, two completely disparate things sort of suddenly together. But it certainly is the definition of humor. Something’s out of context and smashing into something else. That’s this book has a lot of that.

Oh, it does. It’s so satisfying. I’m also just thinking there’s a twist that pops in the letters when you realize something that Elizabeth has been withholding. And it does not deal with the gentleman border, or the gentleman actor, excuse me. And it just it I was laughing so hard. I almost thought he was like, of course, this makes a ton of sense, and has something to do with her sister. But there’s a lot of that kind of, what do we do with our secrets? How do our secrets define us? How do we put our secrets out into the world or not? I want to get back to Lauren Groff for a second. She, as I said, had written this wonderful introduction to the collected stories, and she is great. And she is also a former student of yours as was Emma Straub, which I love the idea that there’s a direct lineage between you and two of my favorite women on the planet. One of the things Lauren talks about in that introduction, that anyone who has read your work knows is just this, there’s this Lorrie Moore voice that really cannot be imitated, right? Like, it’s so wildly unique. It seems like you’ve had it all along, though it feels like we start with Self-Help. And here we are. And I can see the through line. And I can see sort of this raised eyebrow right that you have for all of us.

That’s great. I, you know, I think a writer might be the last to know about the through line between their work because to get work written, you have to feel that it’s new, you have to feel — this something I haven’t done before. That’s what I had to feel with every single thing that I wrote like, this is new and different this is and Lauren writes that like, you know, I just spent time with Lauren in Berlin, I was at the American Academy in Berlin with her together, it was really fun. She was there with her beautiful family. And it was just really nice. So there may be certain aspects of style in the sentences, there’s still your writing to your ear, you know, you’re writing, probably to the same year, even though you think you’re doing something that you’ve never done before, that inner ear that’s still the probably the same inner ear may be modified as you go through life a little but musicality, the sense of rhythm is probably just there always. And if you write at all in a poetic way, or in the first person, if you’re worried about how a humorous line has to scan, you’re writing to the to the inner ear for its rhythms, and it’s sound. So the sound of a book, the sound of a story, those are very, very key. And even though you may feel you’re writing a brand-new book, sound may be reporting in to the same inner ear that the author has. I hope there are differences among the books and I always hope that I’ve gotten better, but you know, I probably have just gotten different, a little bit in terms of subject matter and all of that, but you have to feel that as you as you go through life as a writer, you’d have to feel this next book is new, this next book is different. And you have to hope that your that your best work is ahead of you. I still think that at my old age, I think oh my best work is still ahead. Hang on for five more years. I’ll have another book.

Oh, please. I can be patient. Oh, I can. No, no, I can be totally patient and I have a subscription to The New York Review. So I’m good. I’m okay. But I’ll be fine. But I am I’m just thinking about what you said. Just now that there are certain elements that I know I’m going to get and I say this even in regards to like your television criticism, like you’ve written about The Wire, and you’ve written about True Detective, and you’ve written about Friday Night Lights. And even there, I know, I’m reading a piece by you. But I was never really expecting you to write about television, though. I’m glad you did. I never expected really.

It was a very weird journey. Because I wasn’t really a television person. I just happen to spend a summer watching The Wire. I love The Wire and then I went to find things that were written about it, you know, this is the this is what criticism is useful for, right? It’s why the New York Times turned so much writing over to Succession, people wanted to discuss it after they’ve seen it. I think they turned a little too much. Too many column inches in Succession, but whatever. But I could find nothing about The Wire, nothing in the New York Times, nothing. And this was years later, a little bit in London, there was nothing in The New Yorker, The New Yorker had never reviewed it. And I just thought that isn’t really crazy. So I asked Bob Silvers, if I could do it, and he said, Sure. And then he started to hand me TV pieces, right? Wow, am I becoming a TV reviewer? This will be a nice gig in my old age, maybe? I don’t know. But I started to write about these really interesting shows.

And also quite novelistic in the way they deal with time, and arcs, and all of that. I mean, they really,

And the cinematography and all of them. And the acting, those two things made them so unlike the television that I grew up with, to the extent that I grew up with it, but everybody does, to some extent, didn’t look like a film, did it look like TV. And suddenly, there’s this new age of television, where the television doesn’t look like TV, it looks like a film. And the actors were fantastic. And all of these shows and, you know, the writing, in a sense was the least of it. I hate to say that, because it sounds like I’m not in solidarity with the writer strike, but I am, I am. But the actors are, you know, and the photography on the shows that I wrote about were fantastic.

Well, I think to story find so many different routes to us, right? I think that there are times where even narrative and you’ve been a political novelist for quite some time. I mean, if you think about it, right, domestic dramas are political. I mean, I say this all the time. And one of the examples I use is The Hours by Michael Cunningham, there’s that first section of the book, where, you know, the young man’s mother is basically having a meltdown in her kitchen while she bakes him a cake and but as a synopsis for like the entire 1950s and being a woman and being a married woman, especially in the suburbs, like it’s just it is a wildly political piece. And no one ever really thinks about that. They just kind of think about it as someone’s mommy having a meltdown in the kitchen while she bakes a cake. And I’m like, well, actually, right. Let’s talk about what this really means, and I think it’s easy for us still as a culture, which is really frustrating to say, well, here’s this television work and here’s this other stuff and look at how inherently political it all is. And I’m like, well, the stuff that you’re dismissing as a domestic drama out of hand is actually covering class and money and all of the stuff that succession is doing with like fancy sweatshirts and private planes, novels have been doing for quite a long time, just with different terrain, right?

Did you watch succession?

I try. The coverage has been fascinating. I’ve actually been reading a lot of the coverage just because it’s fascinating, but at the same time, I’m kinda like, I don’t have enough time and I wish it puzzled me more.

I don’t remember a show being covered in in a news major national newspaper the way this has been covered.

I thought it was very funny when the LA Times ran an obituary for the father. That was right. I was like, oh, that’s a way to get people to read the newspaper again. And I’m like, I would just hope that some of the folks who are watching Succession realize that you know, there are everyday true-life examples of this happening all around them and maybe those are worth paying attention to. There’s just less cashmere or less visible cashmere, really quite know how to explain it. But I don’t know I just get so much pleasure from books and I don’t always have time to watch the things that maybe I should be following up on. I think I watch maybe two episodes in the first season, and I was like, okay, I’m good.

I think that’s all you need. I think you need to, I shouldn’t say this. But each season, they’ll do, that’ll do, I think.

I also ran out of steam on Billions.

I didn’t ever watch that.

I tried and I was good, very quickly, I was like, okay. And, you know, all props to the teams making this stuff, I think there’s a lot of juggling and a lot of hard work that goes into producing something like that. It just didn’t connect for me in the way that I can connect with a book. And I might also be because there are people doing the job in front of me, and I’m watching them as opposed to thinking about what the language on the page means and where the story is, and who I believe and who I trust on the page.

And there’s so much more, I mean, there’s so much more careful language and also interiority you have access to everybody’s interior, or at least, an interiority and a novel or a short story. And you really don’t have access to any interiority and screen narrative. I mean, you can guess it, you’re really in the hands of the of the, of the actors, they have to signal, and they’re not even supposed to do that as performers, they’re supposed to just embody without signaling. But at any rate, you don’t have that you don’t have what you have in a prose narrative.

I think, too, we’re in a interesting moment for criticism. And I mean, certainly, this is something you’ve been doing for the New York Review. Since what 99? Wow. Okay, so 99 ish. But you have this great way of thinking about criticism that you’re coming to is less so with television, obviously, and much more with novels, but that you’re coming as a practitioner, that you’re not working out of theory that you’re not working out of, you know, a plan as it were, which I love because you also teach. I mean, you’ve taught in MFA programs at Wisconsin, and now at Vanderbilt, and I just, I love this idea of you saying, well, no, actually, I just work through this thing. And I’m going to sit down, and then I’m going to tell you what I think and it’s not from, you know, you’re not coming at it sideways, you’re just saying, here we are, I want to talk.

I just want to use ordinary language, I don’t want to use academic language, I don’t want professional language, I don’t want I don’t want any jargon to be there. And I don’t I mean, I’ve avoided jargon my whole life anyway. So it’s not even that I’m well versed in it and just not using it, I just, I just don’t have access to it and don’t want access to it. So yeah, when I, when I’m looking at fiction, I am looking at it as a practitioner and paying attention to the voice and the structure and all that, but I want to talk about it in ordinary ways. And when I’m looking at television or film, especially television, I have looked at it sort of as a Martian, you know, not as a practitioner, as you say, but as someone who had a highly regulated childhood television, we were not allowed to watch more than like an hour and a half a week and things like, and the television was in the cellar, and it wasn’t even in the living room. So I have sort of come as a complete outsider to the television of now, I hope that’s a useful thing. To come as a sort of Martian and go, Hey, look at this. I mean the Rangers eye, or the Extra-Terrestrial eye, is what all artists are doing. They say, let me bring this sort of odd view and this unaccustomed view to what I’m watching or what I’m seeing what I’m observing, as opposed to someone deep in the knowledge of of that thing. So you’re coming in from the outside and presumably coming in from the outside, you’ll see things that people on the inside would not say, I think when one writes fiction, one has to sort of start with what’s inside one’s heart and what’s on one’s mind. When one writes criticism, one is really starting external, externally to win sales. But it’s having a conversation obviously, with things inside you, but you don’t, you don’t begin there necessarily, you sort of begin more externally.

I mean, obviously, you’re just gonna keep doing the novels when you feel like them in the stories when you feel like doing them in the criticism when you know, the spirit moves you, as it were, but have you thought about what’s next? I mean, one of the things cuz I do appreciate if we just get work from you when we get work from you. And, you know, it’s kind of a delight and it’s like, oh, there’s a new Lorrie Moore.

She’s still alive, yea or who is she. I started something in Berlin. So I will be working on that. I owe the New York Review a review, I’ve owed to them for a while, we’ll see if I complete that. But there will be other things, I won’t die. I won’t.

Okay. Please don’t. But more importantly…

Even if I do die, I can come back.

I mean, also just piecing together what you’ve been saying. And then realizing that, you know, I Am Homeless, If This is Not My Home was the book you were talking about. It’s like, you know, eventually, eventually, we can work backwards. So that’s kind of fun.

Because I think I said early on that I was I was doing a ghost story years ago, this is sort of my ghost story. And the next, one of the next things that I will have will have some Berlin in it. Berlin is the most astonishing city, historically, of the 20th century, I think, very complicated. And very, you know, very interesting and alive, but really processing so much history, there reminded me a little bit of the South, in terms of all the sort of tragic history that has to be processed.

I can see that. I’m just gonna sit here quietly while you do your thing. I would very much like that. That does feel more like a novel than stories. I don’t know. Am I wrong about that?

I don’t know. Okay, let’s see.

Sorry. Sorry, right. You don’t have to.

So I’m not contracted for anything. It doesn’t have to be one thing or another.

I’m gonna make the wheel in my head stop turning because now I’m because also I’ve finished that. It’s 192 pages.

It’s sometimes dense. And sometimes the dialogue moves as moves along quickly. And then And then sometimes that writing gets packed and compressed.

I didn’t feel like it was dense at all. It really felt like it flew for me, and it flew. Not because I was reading a novel by you so much as I really was invested in in puzzling out where we were going. That’s what I just I wanted to know, where Finn and Lily and Max and Elizabeth were taking us, I was just like, what, and it was so satisfying. And that’s the thing that I just I really want to keep coming back to and I know you and I were joking about beach reading before we started taping and I’m the kind of person who takes Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses to the beach. So I know, other people do not do that. But I would say, you know, the new one is totally perfect beach reading. Oh, it can be read anywhere. It can be read in your backyard. It can be read on the sofa, can be read on the beach. It’s just the language is really satisfying. The emotional journey is really satisfying the characters. I mean, they’re great. And yet I was kind of like, do I trust you? Where are you going with? I mean, Lily is a therapy clown. I’m just gonna, I’m gonna just let that hang out there. Lily’s a therapy clown.

She’s not a very good one.

No, but she’s still a therapy clown.

I guess I just sucked at it, she said.

There’s that. Do you miss this world? Do you miss these characters?

I sort of do and sort of don’t, you know, with A Gate at the Stairs. I missed Tassie Keltjin for a whole year. I’m not going to. I’m not really going to miss Finn for a whole year. He’s a different sort of character. But do I feel attached to him? Do I think about him? Sure. Yeah, Lily. Sure. And everybody else in there? Sure. Maybe because they’re a little older than Tassie Keltjin was in A Gate at the Stairs. I feel like the characters in this novel, their lives are already formed and made. Again, A Gate at the Stairs, there were still some questions as to what was going to happen to her. You know, who would she be when she was 40? You don’t really know.

I also don’t want readers to lose sight of the fact that Finn and Lily do have a love story.

It’s a love story. It’s supposed to be a love story. Yes, people’s ideas of love a little bit and maybe test their to do it a little bit. It has a little bit of anger in that, the issues that we mentioned before but because we’re trying we’re trying to talk around a lot of things with our it’s supposed to be love story and he he loves her and I think she loves him. I think certainly they had a love of some sort for a while but prior to when the book begins and they make reference to that to when they met and you know, blah blah blah. So it is supposed to be a love story. It’s supposed to be a ghost story. I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home is supposed to sound like a blues song. Yeah.

Yeah, it does.

And it’s about you know, it’s about not feeling quite at home in your in your own life, which none of these characters quite to the end that’s the blues, you know, feeling that you’re not quite in the right place.

It’s so satisfying this book. It’s so satisfying. Alright, that seems like a really good place to wrap as much as I would rather just keep hanging out with you. You have things to do. So I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home is out now. Lorrie Moore, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over.

Thank you so much.