Jen A. Recommends I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, By Lorrie Moore
“Failure is how you meet people. Failure is how you sometimes get strong.”
— Lorrie Moore
So much of what happens in our lives is out of our control. Relationships are forged and evaporate into thin air at the whim of the universe. It’s how we handle those sometimes devastating moments of happenstance that tests our ability to rely on our fundamental core beliefs of who we are. Life leaves a mark and we are often haunted by all that has come before.
Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, sets us down gently into the eye of a whirlpooling primordial soup of life, love, loss and carrying on. Moore roots Finn, her protagonist, in the reality of an experience everyone living has probably had. But it is a difficult, painful experience. So she sends Finn out to distract himself from his original pain with another even more difficult to manage pain.
He embarks on an extraordinary magical mystery road trip with a sort-of-dead therapy clown. There is also a very clever interstitial vining throughout the novel of letters from a Civil War era boardinghouse owner to her sister. All of these seemingly disparate threads come together with ease in the end.
Though she is mostly celebrated for her short story collections, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is Moore’s first novel in 14 years. It is a mesmerizing and deeply satisfying tale, well worth the wait. It tells us that those we love, whom we often fail, will always be with us — haunting us from the great beyond. As someone who is haunted, I found it warmly, reassuringly comforting. Carry on!