The power of a second person narrator has been a topic of much discussion as we have gone through Lorrie Moore's Self Help. Some have argued that it makes you more sympathetic to the characters and helps you understand them, while others feel indifferent or that the sympathy can be accredited to other aspects of the storytelling. In any case, the trend of her "how-to" stories read to me as dry, sarcastic stories of how the narrator ended up in situations with underlying messages of 1) haha this isn't ideal but at least I can laugh about it and 2) this could be any of you readers as well. It's almost like they were written for two audiences- readers who are probably quick to judge mistresses or breaking up with someone who has health problems, but also for the author/narrator to backtrack and remember how they found themselves in a predicament.
How to talk to your mother (notes) is a different playing field. While there is a hint of classic Lorrie Moore's dry humor, that isn't the overall tone of the story. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this story is filled with lots of regret. From the beginning (or end, depending on how you think of it) of the story, the narrator doesn't have a choice. The story has already taken place and there are no decisions to make... instead everything has happened and the only "how to" is for the readers. She can't revive her mother and start with a clean slate in the same way that the "other woman" can break up with the married man and move on in life. Instead, the only thing she can hope to get out of this story is that someone else would read her story, realize her regret, and choose to live their life differently as a result. In essence, it's more of a how-NOT-to story.
Another trademark Lorrie Moore storytelling trait is that she includes many little subplots or repeated phrases that show up throughout the story. In How to be an other woman there were lists and in How there were tests. In How to talk to your mother, the theme of pregnancy is strung throughout the entire story from the narrator's own birth to her multiple pregnancies and subsequent abortions. Does anybody have any inferences on why she would mention those? Someone pointed out in class that she's talking about how to talk to your mother but then intentionally doesn't become a mother. I've tried to mull through this but I can't come up with any logical conclusions. Maybe she doesn't realize the importance of mothers until it's too late?
In "How to Talk to Your Mother (notes)" I almost got a sense that the narrator was asking us how she should have done things differently. How do you talk to your mother when she is suffering from dimensia and nothing in your life seems to be going your way? In this light, the narrator comes off almost desperate as she converses with her appliances, dreaming of giant babies floating through the sky, wondering how she got here and what she could have done differently.
ReplyDeleteAnd with your questioning about the constant reference of her pregnancies, I'm not sure if I'm correct about this, but I thought she mentioned them to make us understand the kind of difficult situation she has always been in. She wants a companion in life. The right companion. She didn't see her mother as the right companion until she died and Ginnie was forced to face the fact that she is very lonely. She has the chance to have a strong bond with her mother and she blew it. She has a chance to have a child, a strong mother-daughter bond, but she blew that one too. She has avoided every chance that she has come across to have a companion, and now, looking back, she can't seem to figure out why. Possibly her mother and children weren't the right companions she needed in life. If that's the case, she will keep talking to her refrigerator until the right one comes along. Someone that understands her and she is able to accept. But, like I said, this is just an idea. Because of Moore's ambiguity, we don't really know the fully story and therefore can only make conclusions with the information given.
What do other people think about her pregnancy references? I do agree that this story has a tone of regret but I also get the feeling that hindsight is 20/20. She wasn't ready at the time. Now that it's too late she wishes she had taken the opportunity, but I am convinced that she made the choice she had to AT THE TIME because she wasn't ready/didn't understand the significance when she was younger.
DeleteI think Moore often uses the second person to show that she kind of just fell into certain situations; she didn't just push her way through them. And as you said, I think she wants us to see that maybe we shouldn't judge, because if things had turned out differently, we could be the narrators of stories like hers.
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