Self-Help

Lorrie Moore's "Self-Help" fits the mold of a short story cycle perfectly, as one that does not require the same setting and recurring characters. As I read the stories I did find that the narrators, their mothers and significant others all blended into the same characters. After the first few two or three stories I even began to think that the narrators were all the same character, but then they were assigned different names and each had their own mother with some sort of psychological or physical ailment. From "How to be an Other Woman" to "To Fill" there is a constant voice from a female narrator. To me I felt like each of these women shared the same thoughts. One could easily have been substituted for another. While "Dubliners" relied on setting as a constant throughout the cycle and "Winesburg, Ohio" and "In Our Time" had recurring characters, "Self-Help" has none of these, except in spirit. 

That being said, I found "Self-Help" to be incredibly difficult to read. One of the major qualms I had with the way Lorrie Moore wrote is that most, if not all, the narrators were extremely either anti-male or had a very negative attitude towards men. Having to read almost 200 pages of feminist drawl was excruciatingly painful and boring. It made me want to jump into the book and argue with each narrator. While Moore can be praised with writing a cycle of short stories professing feminism and showing things from a woman's point of view, I felt that she may have done the opposite. All these women seem the same. Is that the message she wanted to send? That all women, when they are in similar circumstances, will act and think the same? She's grouping women together, not individualizing them. Can you really tell the difference between the mistress in the beige raincoat from "How to be an Other Woman" and the woman who cheats on her boyfriend from "How?" They act like the same person and blame the men in their lives for their problems. 

Both of these stories paint men in a negative light, albeit in different ways. The man in "an Other Woman" sleeps around, admitting that while he is not married, has several girlfriends at once while sleeping with the narrator. He obviously seen as a scumbag. The boyfriend in "How" is a very loving, friendly guy who treats his girlfriend well and wants to start a family with her. He loves her very much, yet the narrator pushes him away, cheats on him and tells him that she no longer loves him. HE was suffocating HER. Here you have a woman who hates the man she's with because he's sleeping around and in the next story you have a woman who hates the man she's with because he's too loving and too faithful. This makes no sense at all. This just draws women in a more negative light because Moore writes them as irrational. In fact, in almost every story the, for lack of a better word, antagonist, is a male. In "What Is Seized" there is the cold father.  In "A Kids Guide to Divorce" the father and ex-husbands side of the story is never shown. In "Go Like This" the loving husband Elliot is pushed aside and thought of as an "asshole" whenever he tries to help his dying wife. "In How to Talk to Your Mother" the father is extremely distant. In "Amahl" Moss the boyfriend gets very angry as the narrator tries to get closer to him. There really aren't any male characters painted in a positive light.

Another major theme is disease. In several stories the mothers of the narrators are sick and dying and in "Go Like This" the narrator has decided to end her own life while suffering from cancer. Most of the mothers in these stories are weak and pathetic, even before their illnesses begin to dominate their lives. Many of the mothers have been cheated on and are without a husband at the time of their deaths. This is a subtle way of creating a situation where Moore shows men abandoning their wives and the young, strong-willed daughter must come to the rescue and care for the mother. This happens several times which gets redundant and frustrating to read. Moore may have just titled this book "Pathetic Women who Hate Men" because this is the type of woman she writes about.