I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore
“But the subject of brothers was on his mind. He was trying to mull moments into anecdotes for his own dying one. They should be anecdotes that were amusing, if the listener were actually leaving this earth. But they should not make the dying laugh in a way that made them want more of life. The dying should laugh wearily in a way that said, OK. OK. Enough.”
American author Lorrie Moore’s latest novel I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home (2023) is actually three stories forming a quiet, interwoven meditation on mortality. Moore’s narrative is interwoven with epistolary segments of Elizabeth who mourns for her sister after the American Civil War, while in the present, we follow a man named Finn whose brother Max is in hospice care, and whose ex-wife Lily passes from suicide. While Finn’s conversation with Max struggles to reckon with the reality of death, Finn’s visit to the green cemetery, where Lily is buried beneath a grapefruit tree, sees her returning to him:
“There was Lily, standing in the dead fleabane, holding a large grapefruit like a globe, her shroud draped around her, a cocooning filthy gown… Crazed death had not yet made a stranger of her.”
Resigned to their discovery that death is “kind of a spectrum”, Finn and the half-deceased Lily embark on a journey across the Midwestern states, unpacking all that has happened in the years they were together and apart.
The conversations between the two are both a literal and figurative postmortem: the kind we dream of having with those close to us who have recently passed. It is this interaction which gives the novel such poignancy, as Finn’s one-sided questions become monumental once they are given answers. How are you feeling? Are you – were you – happy? Do you wish for more? Or did you have enough?
Moore’s novel is particularly interested in hauntings. The shadow of Max’s terminal illness looms over Finn across the novel, and Lily’s presence and attachment to Finn melds her unfinished business with his unresolved turmoil. There are other innocuous objects which continue to haunt Finn too, like the litterbox without an associated cat left in his car’s backseat by his landlady or, more metatextually, the intrusions of Elizabeth’s letters into his narrative. The accumulation of ghosts leaves Finn in a passive, possessed state. Things which should be risible or horrifying are, ultimately, just occurrences in a line of events which may as well happen. It is the same for the reader, too.
Moore’s writing style across the novel is ornate, incorporating allusions to literature, pop culture, conspiracy theories and the political atmosphere of just-pre-Trump America. Part of this is to mirror the internal workings of our protagonist, a high school teacher on forced sabbatical for criticising the curriculum, but the style also prods at the reader’s sensibilities, making the book’s topics pricklier and more amorphous. Finn can’t explain his emotionless responses, any more than Max can express his fear of death, or Lily can articulate the nature of her suicidal ideation. Within the detritus of American culture, all three scramble and scavenge for a way of expressing our reality.
At all times, the characters are aware of something being wrong, but they have no easy solutions. This is not a novel which deals in epiphanies. Instead, Moore suggests that these difficulties in our understanding of mortality are things that we must live with.
“Not everything when you die dies all at once and together. And some things flicker back on. You kind of get trapped in this partial power outage. The guys with helmets fix some things but not others… You think you can be the artist of your own death but surprise! You can’t even be the artist of your own art. It always turns out crappier than you planned.”
I first came across Lorrie Moore’s writing in my aspirations to compose my own short fiction – in a list of authors recommended by writing coaches as exemplars of the short story form, Lorrie Moore’s Collected Stories came up frequently. My favourite was “Dance in America”, which is like this novel in microcosm – middle-aged men and women on their first meaningful encounter with the idea of mortality, made speechless and forced to find comfort within death’s uncertainties. I loved this short story for its emotional complexity, but I admit I was a younger person then and I was reading about problems which had never happened to me, experiencing feelings for the first time alongside the overwhelmed characters.
Now, older, and after losing people that I care deeply about, I approach Moore’s style with a renewed perspective. In our modern context, with tragic news fed to us every day, it can be easy for death to be dulled in our emotional lives – something ever-present, and thus easier to forget about. I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home succeeds in the difficult task of re-teaching us how to be broken by death, how being led into an uncertain world of grief and loss can be necessary, healing and beautiful.
Harvey Liu is a fiction writer from Sydney of Chinese-Australian background. He has recently completed the Western Sydney University's The Writing Zone mentorship program, with a story published in the 2022 anthology, Ghost Cities. He is currently working on a sequence of comedic stories centred around working life.