Book Review: I Am Homeless if This is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore

I received an advanced e-copy of this book thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

This is such a weird book. I often like weird in my books and I’m often okay with a meandering, non-linear plot but I’m not sure who the audience is for a book like this.

I was first introduced to Lorrie Moore in a fiction class in university when we read her short story, People Like That Are the Only People Here. It’s a story I’ve thought about countless times since then. And it’s a story that I found painfully true in several ways when I had my own baby in the hospital NICU. I’ve since read more short stories from Moore and a collection of her book reviews. As a short story writer, Moore excels. In the longer format of a novel, I’m not quite sure.

There are two parts to this novel. There are letters from an unnamed women to her sister. This woman keeps a boarding house in an era shortly after the American Civil War (I think; I’m entirely uninterested and ignorant about the US Civil War and so I know there was a lot of context here that I missed out on. That’s my own fault and I don’t blame Moore for it but she does write with an assumption that her reader will have familiarity with this American context and I just don’t.) The letter writer slowly reveals more and more about a certain guest she had and what happened between them.

In the present day, Finn is a teacher visiting his brother in hospice when he gets word that his ex-girlfriend, Lily, has died in a suicide attempt. Their relationship was fraught and complicated and this was not her first attempt. Having missed the funeral, he returns to where she was buried and finds her re-animated corpse waiting for him. They then proceed to go on a road trip together.

I told you it was weird.

The main focus of the novel turns out to be the relationship between Finn and Lily and the majority of the time on the page is spent on their trip together, Lily’s physical body quickly decomposing as they go. But this focus isn’t immediately clear because we have these inserts of the Reconstruction Era letter writer and the first time we meet Finn he is spending time with his dying brother. Whether or not he makes the right choice to leave his brother and chase after Lily is one question and one that could be interesting to delve into. But the book doesn’t seem interested in exploring that and we never really go back to the brother or re-focus on that relationship which initally seems so important to Finn.

The connection between Finn and the letter-writer does eventually become clear but it’s so tenuous and…unimportant. Why bother putting them together? You might as well write a story about me and someone else who also shops at the same grocery store I do. I mean, we’re connected sure, but not in any meaningful way.

Like I said, a lot of the page is devoted to Finn and Lily on this road trip and they have a lot of banter together and circling discussions around their relationship and who they are. Some readers, I think, will love this. They are quirky characters who seem very aware of being quirky. I did not love this and found myself wanting to hurry on to figure out how Finn was connected to the letter-writer or for him to return to his brother, with whom he seemed to have a deeper and healthier connection. And, as I mentioned, neither of those had a satisfying conclusion for me.

In the end, I have liked Moore’s writing enough in the past to not give up on her entirely. I’ll happily read more short stories from her but I might be a bit more hesitant with her next novel.