Lorrie Moore is the only writer that has made me both laugh out loud and tear up within the span of a few pages. In Like Life, she magnifies the beauty in the absurd little things people do that make us love and hate them, and with every sentence I found myself pulled further and further out of the clutches of what had felt like terminal jadedness. Read this and then read her other books, too.
— RileyIn Like Life's eight exquisite stories, Lorrie Moore's characters stumble through their daily existence. These men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can't quite understand how they arrived at their present situations.
Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a Midwest mall. Dennis, unhappily divorced, buries himself in self-help books about healthful food and healthy relationships. One prefers to speak on the phone rather than face his friends, another lets the answering machine do all the talking. But whether rejected, afraid to commit, bored, disillusioned, or just misunderstood, even the most hard-bitten are not without some abiding trust in love.