Cry Rises for Factual Footnotes to Storyteller’s Wrenching Fiction

NEW YORK —  It should have been a triumphant moment. On a crisp fall night, author Lorrie Moore was about to receive the 1998 O. Henry award for the nation’s best short story. An overflow crowd at the National Arts Club turned out to hear her read it.

But something was wrong. Seconds after Moore began, she seemed uncomfortable. She only made it through the first few pages of “People Like That Are the Only People Here”--the harrowing tale of a toddler with cancer--before halting and returning to a chair. Her eyes brimmed with tears.

Anyone who has read Moore’s story can understand the deep emotions it generates. Originally published in the New Yorker, it is a journey into the heart of a parent’s nightmare, a wrenching account of illness and mortality. Yet there was something more personal than literary angst at play in Moore’s aborted reading.

Ever since her story appeared last year, the book world buzzed with speculation that it was autobiographical, a memoir dressed up as fiction. And Moore’s effort to deflect this media curiosity--to protect her privacy--has raised troubling questions about American culture:

Should a fiction writer be subject to the same intrusive spotlight as a politician or Hollywood celebrity? It’s one thing for the author of a tell-all memoir to be prodded by the press, but what about a publicity-shy writer who insists that the details of her life should be off-limits to reporters?

Moore, 41, is not the first writer to feel such pressures. Philip Roth has made a career out of taunting readers and critics with situations that seem to resemble his own life; Norman Mailer’s ego and alter-ego regularly masquerade as characters in his works. These days, America is a carnival of confession--and woe to the author who bucks this trend.

In recent interviews, Moore conceded that her son had been seriously ill but offered no more. It was no one’s business, and it wasn’t important, she said. Moore also told sponsors of the O. Henry event that she had no desire to read her story last month--agreeing to try only at the last minute.

Still, the questions kept coming. Stories in Newsweek, New York magazine, Publishers Weekly and newspapers touched on the autobiographical angle: How coincidental is it that the main character of the story is a writer and teacher, like Moore? How could an author invent such painful situations--down to the most intimate details--without drawing heavily on her own experience?

“It was fiction,” Moore told online magazine Salon. “Things did not happen exactly that way. I re-imagined everything. And that’s what fiction does.”

The lesson, however, seems to be lost in a society hellbent on shattering whatever boundaries remain between public and private lives. Novelist Anne Bernays, who is troubled by the media reaction to Moore’s story, said even the most literate people forget the difference between fiction and fact.

“I’ve written eight novels and one memoir, and people think everything in the novels is true, while I made up things in the memoir,” she noted.

Even if Moore’s story is 100% factual, it wouldn’t make a difference, said Larry Dark, a veteran editor who helped select this year’s O. Henry winners. “The story is what’s important,” he insisted. “Not the writer’s life.”

Throughout Moore’s tale, it’s hard to know where fiction ends and the author’s memory begins. In a stunning passage, the mother rocks her son to sleep in a dark room, after learning he has developed a malignant tumor:

“If you go,” she keens low into his soapy neck, “we are going with you. We are nothing without you. Without you, we are a heap of rocks. Without you, we are two stumps, with nothing any longer in our hearts. Wherever this takes you, we are following; we will be there.”

Was it literature--or reality embroidered as fiction?

The New Yorker ignited the speculation. Referring to the story in the table of contents, the magazine teased readers: “Have writers of memoirs taken over a field that once belonged to novelists?” Then, breaking with custom, it printed a troubled-looking photo of the author on the title-page.

Moore, whose new collection of short stories is a national bestseller, will survive this. But America’s respect for the author as a storyteller may be eroding. Fiction writers, after all, are tour guides bristling with impatience, eager to invent. They liberate us from the tyranny--and tedium--of what we know. Moore celebrated this freedom in a 1997 letter titled “Restlessness”--in which she may have inadvertently answered those who confuse her life with her imagination. The letter was purchased at an auction for literacy programs.

“Restlessness is the useful madness, the heady transport to new worlds,” she wrote. “It subdivides and conquers a life--perhaps yours?--and out of one makes many and out of many a bouquet. Restlessness is the gasoline to the fair. Surely we were not put on this earth to stand like dozing sentries, immobile in our darn good shoes: we were meant to pace a little (the very choreography of creation!) and to wander off here and there, maddening the shrubbery and creasing the lawn.

At least I think so.

I wish you well in all things.

Truly,

Lorrie Moore.