How to Become a Writer Study Guide

Lorrie Moore was born in Glens Falls, a small town in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, in 1957. She majored in English at St. Lawrence University, during which time she won Seventeen magazine’s fiction contest at the age of 19. After college, she worked as a paralegal in Manhattan for two years, then enrolled in Cornell University’s MFA in Creative Writing. Moore realized, while studying at Cornell, that her two creative interests—writing and music—had begun to compete for her attention, so she gave up piano to focus on writing stories and soon began to have those stories accepted by magazines including Fiction International and StoryQuarterly. Upon graduating from Cornell, Moore secured a literary agent and quickly sold her first collection of short fiction, Self-Help, at the age of 26. Moore has since published three more short story collections, three novels, an essay collection, and a children’s book, and has won various prizes including the O. Henry Award and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. She taught creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 30 years before joining the faculty at Vanderbilt University in 2013, serving as the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English.

Though it’s only mentioned by name once during “How to Become a Writer,” the Vietnam War is one of the key events that forms the backdrop of Francie’s childhood. The war spanned from 1955 to 1975 and saw 3.1 million US troops stationed in Vietnam over that time. When Francie is a young teenager, her brother is one of those soldiers, and he eventually returns with severe injuries from the conflict. Though Francie struggles to write about her brother’s experience, her stories frequently revolve around unexpected, violent explosions—a sign that the war and its direct effects on her brother have impacted Francie, showing her that the world around her is volatile and unpredictable. This, in turn, functions as a key realization in her formation as a writer.

When Knopf published Self-Help—Moore’s first collection, which includes “How to Become a Writer”—critics compared it to the works of Grace Paley, a celebrated American short story writer whose first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), focuses, much like Moore’s early stories, on the dynamics of romantic relationships. Several short story collections published around the same time as Self-Help by other American writers, such as Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1989) and Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior (1988), share themes also found in Moore’s own early work, like loneliness, disconnection, and sexuality. These themes also appear in Miranda July’s short story collection No One Belongs Here More than You (2007), which, like “How to Become a Writer” and the other stories in Self-Help, experiments with nontraditional perspectives and subtly absurd humor.