A Gate At The Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

I liked this quote on the back of the book (by Susan Salter Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times): "Lorrie Moore has something that many writers of her generation don't have: She is truly odd...[But] Moore's stories don't leave us in the solitary confinement that oddity can create.... They are the dance halls and constellations in which eccentricity becomes uniqueness."

I find myself liking Moore's characters and connecting to them because of their genuine quirkiness. In high school I read and reread Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? I liked the main character in it. I don't remember her name, but she was a teenage girl, and she was also weird. In A Gate at the Stairs, the main character (Tassie) and I are not only both girls and a little weird (although I think she is a lot odder than I am), but Tassie also grew up on a farm in Wisconsin (a lot different than my farm with her bumbling father and emo mother and close proximity to a big city) and like me, she graduates from her small town high school in 2001. The story starts during her freshman year of college, a few months after 9/11. I can't recall another book I've read in which the main character and I were the same age in the same year.

Who will run the frog hospital? was short (just over a 100 pages) and I had lived a lot less when I read it. It was easy to connect. In A Gate at the Stairs, Tassie and I have a lot more in common, but I also know 200 more pages about her life and I know ten years more about mine, which makes it easier to see that in fact we are quite different.

But it still doesn't make me like her any less.