Birds of America,

the saddest book ever

I read David Sedaris' short story, anthology Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules and I liked the collection, but I couldn't really find an author that I thought I'd like to read much more of until I got to Lorrie Moore's "People Like That Are The Only People Here: Cannonical Babbling in Peed Onk." The story outlines her experience of her son's cancer diagnosis and subsequent recovery. I really wept at the end of this, rather long, short story.

In a perverse desire to feel more pain, I bought Birds of America. This is a collection of the most hopeless, unromantic, morbid tales I have ever read. Though I sadistically enjoyed the beginnings of all the stories, their odd attention to anxiety producing details (like when the main character in "Terrific Mother" is holding a friend's baby and the lawn chair they are sitting on breaks and the baby gets killed in the fall), the endings were dreary beyond belief. Every story I started with the same curious hope that it would make me at least somewhat less suicidal than the last, but by the end I just wanted to throw the book, and my life, away.

Lorrie Moore is a really fabulous writer though.