Header overlay

In Flight from Fitchville

The shelves in my study are crammed with books that I only quite like, to the extent that I think they barely represent my taste in reading, largely because I have pressed all my favourites on voracious friends and family. So imagine my delight a few weeks ago when I discovered a copy of Anagrams by Lorrie Moore in a bookshop bin marked ‘Why Don’t You Try This?’ My second copy of this excellent novel cost me only 99p, something about which I have mixed feelings: as a reader I think it’s wonderful that books of this calibre are available for so little; as a writer I can’t help thinking that Lorrie Moore is being sold down the river. But that’s another story . . .

I pounced upon Anagrams like a long-lost friend, which indeed it was. I first read it when I was a single parent trying to rebuild a life for myself and my son, and it seemed to me that Lorrie Moore was writing much of my own fragile narrative alongside that of her heroine Benna. The book is set in Fitchville, a featureless place that is the epitome of small-town America, and it tells the story of a sparky, gritty trailer-park girl who makes anagrams out of words, and out of her life as well, constantly changing the context and nature of what she appears to be in an almost existential bid to create something out of nothing.

Benna charts the frustrations, the breathtaking insights and the mundane tenderness of daily life with a small child in a way that struck at my heart. She has an eye for the minor intimacies and the domestic commonplaces which mean so little individually, but which collectively carry an incalculable emotional weight.

I sit on the edge of the bathtub, drying off Georgianne, marvelling that the human race has managed to create such comforts for itself as the warm fluffy nubs of towels, the squirming, nearsighted silk of daughters.

What brought me up short was that, although the challenges I was facing with my baby were all too real, Benna’s life is so lonely and so difficult for her that she becomes the single parent of an imaginary child. She mentions her in passing while chatting to Gerard, who might be a boyfrien

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

The shelves in my study are crammed with books that I only quite like, to the extent that I think they barely represent my taste in reading, largely because I have pressed all my favourites on voracious friends and family. So imagine my delight a few weeks ago when I discovered a copy of Anagrams by Lorrie Moore in a bookshop bin marked ‘Why Don’t You Try This?’ My second copy of this excellent novel cost me only 99p, something about which I have mixed feelings: as a reader I think it’s wonderful that books of this calibre are available for so little; as a writer I can’t help thinking that Lorrie Moore is being sold down the river. But that’s another story . . .

I pounced upon Anagrams like a long-lost friend, which indeed it was. I first read it when I was a single parent trying to rebuild a life for myself and my son, and it seemed to me that Lorrie Moore was writing much of my own fragile narrative alongside that of her heroine Benna. The book is set in Fitchville, a featureless place that is the epitome of small-town America, and it tells the story of a sparky, gritty trailer-park girl who makes anagrams out of words, and out of her life as well, constantly changing the context and nature of what she appears to be in an almost existential bid to create something out of nothing. Benna charts the frustrations, the breathtaking insights and the mundane tenderness of daily life with a small child in a way that struck at my heart. She has an eye for the minor intimacies and the domestic commonplaces which mean so little individually, but which collectively carry an incalculable emotional weight.
I sit on the edge of the bathtub, drying off Georgianne, marvelling that the human race has managed to create such comforts for itself as the warm fluffy nubs of towels, the squirming, nearsighted silk of daughters.
What brought me up short was that, although the challenges I was facing with my baby were all too real, Benna’s life is so lonely and so difficult for her that she becomes the single parent of an imaginary child. She mentions her in passing while chatting to Gerard, who might be a boyfriend or might not – as with everything in Benna’s world, it’s hard to tell:
. . . and suddenly I realize what I’ve said. The little piece of planet I’ve been operating on shudders and twists . . . I hesitate. I’m a Beruban cliff-diver. I take a deep breath, and my feet push off. ‘I made her up.’ I’m sailing through air. Gerard stares at me, uncomprehending. ‘You made her up? You made up an imaginary daughter?’ ‘Of course not,’ I say. ‘What, you think I’m an idiot? I made up a real daughter. Yeah.’ I can feel the sea, the heat behind my face. ‘I don’t go around making up imaginary daughters.’ I pause. ‘That would get too abstract. Even for me.’
Benna doesn’t draw the line at inventing a child for herself; it transpires that her friend Eleanor doesn’t exist either and even Gerard’s shape shifts throughout the novel. At one moment he is teaching a kind of aerobics to pre-school children, next she describes him as a jazz pianist and later he pops up as a part-time carpet salesman. He is a mate, a lover, her ex-husband. Yet the characters are so vividly drawn that when Lorrie Moore pulls the rug from under your feet and reminds you that they are figments of Benna’s imagination, the loneliness that this reveals is desolating and the effect vertiginous. When Benna does venture into relationships with ‘real’ people, they are doomed to failure. She teaches creative writing and has a short affair with one of her students; it comes to nothing in the end but it does afford her a brief respite from her unhappiness.
We are gasping, quiet, in the dark, and then the wash of violet and night tornadoes through my legs and up behind my eyes, plumbs and spirals my spine, and I know if I can keep feeling like this I will be okay, if I can feel like this I’m not dead, I won’t die. Life is sad. Here is someone.
When talking about her work as a teacher, Benna refers to herself in the third person (the rest of the book is written in the first), so that these two Bennas offset each other in another kind of anagram. Reality and the perception of it are constantly shifting. The passages that deal with writing allow Lorrie Moore to demonstrate to the full her fascination and facility with words. Benna and her non-existent friend Eleanor (who studies Anguish-as-a-Second-Language) are endlessly playing word games together. I would scribble the words over and over again on the napkin, trying to make them fit – like a child dividing three into two, not able to make it go. ‘Howdy,’ I said to Eleanor when she arrived and flopped down. I had love sick and evil sock scrawled in large letters. ‘You’re losing it, Benna. It must be your love life.’ Eleanor leaned over and wrote bedroom and boredom; she had always been the smarter one. (Eleanor also makes a habit of winding down her car window and shouting at passing joggers, ‘Why don’t you go home and read Middlemarch?’ I wanted her to be my best friend too.) While Anagrams is achingly poignant, it is not a depressing read; quite the opposite. Lorrie Moore skeins together Benna’s heartbreak and her humour to dazzling effect, offering an education in how to rise above what life can throw at you with wit that crackles like static electricity and a stoicism that keeps your heart intact. Gaiety and sadness are knitted into almost every line. I found myself laughing at one moment while my heart clenched at the next. Benna’s main theme is what she describes as ‘this slow lovely grind that is love, that is the secret of bodies, private as grief ’. I was reading the book at a time in my life when there didn’t seem to be quite enough love to go around, rather as it was for Benna. Her yearning became my yearning; her defiance and maybe even a little of her flaky valour (‘I light a cigarette and try to look sophisticated. I am that afraid of the world’) began to rub off on me. At one point Benna reflects: ‘Words, I think, words are all you need for love – you say them and then just for the hell of it your heart rises and spills over into them.’ For me this was a small but perfectly formed literary epiphany, not just because it so neatly married my two obsessions, love and language, but because it made me feel that you can use words to make things happen: that if you say something, then it must be so. Benna uses her skills as a writer to comfort herself, making up anagrams of the people she wished would fill her life. Reading Lorrie Moore made me see that you can struggle as a writer and struggle as a single parent, but there are moments when your heart rises and spills, and then anything is possible.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 15 © Kate Dunn 2007


About the contributor

Kate Dunn worked as an actress for 10 years before giving birth to her first book. Her son Jack was born three weeks later. As well as her novel Rebecca’s Children, she has written three works of non-fiction: Always and Always: Wartime Letters of Hugh and Margaret Williams, Exit Through the Fireplace: The Great Days of Rep and Do Not Adjust Your Set: The Early Days of Live Television.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.