Describing the premise of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home will not do justice to the stunning craft Lorrie Moore has committed to page. The opening plot line that shows up intermittently throughout the book is set in the past, with a woman writing letters to a deceased sister about the boarders in her home. In the modern day, Finn visits his dying brother in hospice before receiving news that his ex has taken her life. The majority of the novel then focuses on Finn abandoning his brother’s bedside to go to his ex’s grave, only to reunite with her there and take her on a roadtrip to where she actually wants to be buried while she decays and dies for real (for the third time?). It’s kind of like Weekend At Bernie’s, that is, if Weekend At Bernie’s were the most beautiful, depressing, tender, and heart wrenching book in recent memory.
The book is finely wrought and the premise isn’t quite like anything I’ve read before, so I absolutely loved it. Full disclosure, though, when I looked it up online afterward I found it had received a middling review from the public at large, with many people rating it at 1 or 2 stars. I was stunned and perplexed that people could view the book so poorly, because to me it was irresistibly moving.
Moore is a gifted writer from a stylistic standpoint. She offers passing descriptions that are wonderfully evocative: “His look is like last year’s bird’s nest” (7), “Finn cleared his throat as if it were full of notepads and paper scraps” (28). The turns of phrase in the text are poetic and there’s a natural rhythm to the writing that helps to punctuate key ideas and create an emotional impact. Finn’s relationship with Lily (who has left him for another man) is described as waxing and waning. Moore writes that he “had been the waning beau for so long he had never really absorbed being the ex. He was always just waning. But he could wax! He really could. He had. Every once in a while the phone would ring and there was Lily’s voice and he and she would wax again. He would take whatever she would offer” (70). There’s a nearly farcical tone here, but the end of the paragraph emphasizes Moore’s poetic bent: “He was not a cold mad moon. He was a circle of light made from leftover sun” (70).
I love the characters in the book, both for how their personalities show in conversation and how they are characterized by the narrator. Early on, Lily is introduced as a somewhat chaotic figure stricken with mental illness, “The noonday demon, the black downward dog, the devil that had long ago grabbed [her] and rammed her head into the wall” (30). Yet, at the same time, Finn saw her as “beautiful and funny. Sort of” (30). Finn recognizes that she wore him out and then left him for someone new that she could wear out, but he “still thought of her every pathetic day. The prick and tingle of her was a phantom limb: his mind was independent and self-starting and did not give up in its attempt to enliven the phantom” (30). The passages about their relationship drip with sincerity and authenticity. There’s even a bit of humour here in describing her as a phantom limb where “even if the limb remained phantom, he knew it was on permanent standby, waiting for a signal” (30).
Finn and Lily have a number of unresolved conversations, and between them there are a number of things that go unsaid, often spoken of only allusively or through symbols. If there is a flaw in the book, it is that, admittedly, sometimes the symbolism threatens to break through as too on-the-nose, but Moore generally demonstrates the necessary restraint to maintain the impact of the moment.
In fact, Moore demonstrates a great deal of control and I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a book that knows what it is doing. Early on, Finn reflects on the role of humour in depressing situations. He wants to bring levity to the conversation with his dying brother, but his humour has to suit the situation—a kind of humour that elicits no laughter. That then serves as the template for the rest of the novel, which offers plenty of funny moments: not funny ha ha; more like funny womp womp (sad trombone). I find that the tragic nature of the book hits harder precisely because it is replete with humour; the jokes punctuation the true sadness of the situations. For example, one of the characters writes in a letter to her dead sister, “P.S. I used your ashes this past January outside on the icy stairs for the safe walking of the boarders. I felt strongly you wouldn’t mind being put to good use” (179). There’s an irreverence towards life and death that helps the text sting and shine.
The dialogue of the book really helps to emphasize that balance of light and dark. It’s witty, snappy, sad, and deeply authentic. Moore’s sense of rhythm in conversations would make I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home a perfect candidate for a stage play or an indie film. There are moments charged with meaning that linger and all the peaks-and-valleys one could hope for from a scene-construction point of view. As Finn and his corpse non-bride drive to her future gravesite, they banter back and forth, bicker with the tenderness of the deeply close, and share some pretty special moments of sarcasm, but Lily in particular drops a number of bombs that turn the knife and turn it hard. Finn’s love for her, despite his frustrations, is clear. Moore provides the following dialogue and description of Finn:
“Lily, you are ruthless,” he found himself murmuring with affection and gratitude---he was without power, so he wasn’t sure, but for a moment it felt like unquellable happiness. (97)
Immediately after that, Lily offers such a sorrowful apology for taking her own life and the depression that plagued her while they were together:
“I am so sorry,” she said, “that in our years together I was unable to wake every day with a song in my heart.” She smelled like warm food cooling. Sorrow had entered her face and her mouth split into the downturned clownish crescent it used to take her professional makeup to produce. “At least not the right song.” (97)
Oh, did I forget to mention that Lily was a professional clown that tried to cheer kids up and that she was buried in her oversized clown shoes? And that as they travel she can’t be warmed up too much lest she decompose? Anyway, the idea of not waking up with the right song in your heart is such a small, poignant reference to her feelings. For some additional backstory, Lily takes her life while she’s in a facility that cares for her. Finn is told that she drowned herself in the shower. After dying, Lily professes not to remember what happened in the lead-up to her death. On the road trip, she suggests that she broke her ankle by slipping in the shower:
“Broke your ankle? That’s what you think you did?”
“It was a little slippery.”
“Mmmmmm. Perhaps we should get it looked at.”
“Are you joking?” she asked. “Sometimes I can tell but not always.” (109)
The idea of her killing herself is sad enough, but if you factor in that it was perhaps an accident, that she slipped and fell and drowned, I feel like that makes it even sadder, especially since the assumption is that she did it intentionally. I also appreciate the way this exchange ends, uncertain whether Finn is joking or not, because “sometimes [she] can tell but not always.” I think that that line characterizes Moore’s project so aptly. It’s unclear how much of their conversations are jokes and how much of them are serious—same with the book, it’s unclear how much of it is meant to be serious, funny, seriously funny, or funnily serious. That ambiguity is a critical part of my enjoyment of this text—but more on that shortly.
First, I need to address the power of the final interaction between Finn and Lily. For most of the book, Finn is on the road trip with Lily so that she can be buried at the people farm. There’s a trope in literature that I have grown to love deeply, with the most notable example in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and it is the trope of “being told and not told.” There’s a sense of inevitability that we just try to look past. In Ishiguro’s work, you know that the fate reserved for the children is not a positive one and that their hopes to transcend it are futile. In I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, there are several inevitabilities that we try to push aside. First, that Finn’s brother will die while he is away on this road trip—he has a premonition and senses it when it happens. Second, that his road trip with Lily ends with her being dead and gone forever. We try to avoid these realities and revel in naivety, but they are inevitable. So, the final interaction between Finn and Lily hits hard:
“Listen to me,” she said with some tenderness. “Everything is going to be OK.” In her personal revolutions she was like an unrotating planet with a permanent dark side and a permanent light side where the sun never set. She had always been like that. Was there a line in between, a sweet Goldilocks zone? No, in this tale Goldilocks was devoured by the bears and the zone was just a permanently positional stripe of rising hope, which was also a stripe of permanently positional sinking hope. (171)
I’ll pause briefly here to let that hope simultaneously rise and sink. The passage continues:
“You’re just going to leave me here?” he asked.
“You want gas money?” She raised her eyebrows and let go, stepped back, an
opalescent figure and face. Above the clown nose her eyes blackened and emptied, losing their interested gaze in exchange for bleak determination.
“I’m jealous of the damn dirt,” he said. “I realize it’s over---but I can’t let go,” he added.
“Isn’t that, like, a song?”
“Oh, I’m sure it is very much like a song.”
“One does not die all at once. There are stages.”
“I’ve gathered. And one does not grieve all at once. But there really aren’t stages, as advertised. There’s just a kind of sad soup of the day
“I’m grateful for your driving. And for so many other things.”
“Words.” He tried to make his face contemptuously still, but he suspected affection showed regardless.
“Well. I’ve assembled them and give them to you.”
“I’m afraid of your desertion. Your self-desertion. Your desertion of everything.”
Punishing scorn was hard for him to summon or depict. He understood now that she had had to return to him, to make her reappearance to him, because he was the only person who would have actually believed it was her. (171)
The fact that Finn admits to her that he can’t let go is such a tragic moment (again, interspersed with her accusation that he wants gas money). The unspoken gratitude between them is undercut with scorn, the scorn undercut with tenderness. The scene that follows is just as beautiful, describing them turning away from each other for the last time—but I’ll leave that for you to experience. I appreciate, though, how Moore navigates the complexity of Finn’s feelings (as well as Lily’s). If you go back to the passage that introduced their relationship, Finn is embittered at her leaving him for another man, “yet the deprivation of her intimacy had made a small dent in his heart, and in his breathing, and in the hard candy of his eyes. The thought of her was everywhere but nowhere---an omniscient narrator” (30).
What I’d like to return to, though, is the final line of the passage above. Finn comes to the understanding that she had to reappear to him because he is the only one that would believe her. There’s a special bond there, but it’s also evocative of the core ambiguity of the text: how much of this happens? If we take it literally, Finn discovers a zombie that he drives to its grave, but stops along the way at restaurants and hotels with Lily’s corpse propped on his shoulder—and everyone just goes along with it. At a more figurative level, this is a journey he is on himself, with an imagined Lily who he knows intimately and knows the rhythm of her dialogue well enough to converse with a ghost he has imagined. Or, maybe Lily really is back from the dead and is cognizant enough to fake being alive for just a few more days. The fact that this is unresolved adds to the charm of the story, and enhances the early invocation of Finn’s mistrust of his own sanity (he tests himself by submitting editorial comments to the New York Times website and seeing if they get published).
A final thought before moving on from Lily. There’s a tenderness that comes through, even in the imagery Moore applies, to her relationship with Finn. At one moment, “The snow was collecting in her hair and eyelashes, sticking like confetti. Ah, here was their wedding! Then, as if his thought had been heard, a sudden wind came sweeping in, with its oceanic sound and its quick picking up of things and taking them elsewhere in a purposeful hurry that was also a bit random” (90). I find the description here poetic and imagistic, with the snow on her eyelashes leaping to the confetti at a wedding, and then all of it being swept away. It’s also depressing, because Lily then reaches for his hand and he feels the cold of hers, “which had always been cold and bony and he had always liked that, though he had never warmed a ring and slid it on her. Why not? She had never asked. And so he had never had to scrounge around for a reply” (90). It’s such a human moment and the torture these characters endure in their regrets is, again, profoundly moving. Then, Moore switches track and has Finn thinking about Lily donating her body to medical science, how “her hands with their now oyster-gray nails would already have been chopped off” (90). He thinks about how “Perhaps he would have been given a pair of her gloves, as a memento, and he would have worn them around, his hands inside of them, soft as if inside of her. And he would have gone through life like that for many very sad years” (90). That idea of holding onto her gloves—wearing her—for years after she is gone shows the depth of the tenderness between them.
What remains somewhat complex is Finn’s response to his brother’s death. Max is in the hospital and Finn leaves him in order to pursue Lily, showing her devotion to her. Like with Lily, Finn’s dialogues with Max are masterful navigations of character. The depth of their bond and their unresolved tensions are fantastically wrought. It’s devastating in its own way to know that when Finn leaves Max’s side, he is abandoning him to die alone—and when he does, people keep telling Finn it was like he was looking for someone. Finn even knows the moment of Max’s death; it is the same moment that Lily leaves, that the World Series ends and that Max’s reason for hanging on has come to a close. The conjunction of all of these ideas simultaneously presents a situation replete with hidden significance and deep emotion.
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a tight reading experience, clocking in at under two hundred pages. I am amazed when books can create such a huge impact in such a small space. Truth be told, I think it could even have been shorter and maintained most of its power. The epistolary sections aren’t, in my mind, essential to the story. The only area of overlap is that Finn finds these letters in a hotel he stays at and they are a historical footnote of a woman murdering a boarder. There are some similarities in the stories that resonate with each other, but ultimately that short story could have been excluded and the heart of the story would still be just as lively.
That said, Moore’s project is extremely unique, and I really appreciate that about it. As Finn is on the road trip, the narrator notes that “They seemed generally to be passing the same sites over and over though nothing was exactly the same just mostly” (111). I love that phrase: “nothing was exactly the same just mostly.” The fact that the phrase is unpunctuated also gives it a special kind of power. I think Moore is capturing something vital and irreproducible, here, which is paralleled in the imagery of the road: “Darkened fields with unreadable signs streaked by them on either side. The days, separate and named, seemed to be no longer arriving. He and Lily were between and among the hours and days rather than in them. The road ran on with its rough sections and moods and daft coordinates” (111). The central characters are adrift, and the reader knows the general direction but not necessarily the specifics of the road signs.
The novel is a truly stunning project that is as depressing as it is beautiful. The reflections on life, death, loss, and grief are nuanced and accurate. When reflecting about the way life is, Moore writes: “Regrettable things kept accruing in life until it was done and you got to say, Well that’s over. Or didn’t get to say, That’s over. But someone was there to say it for you if need be” (46). There’s a bluntness to the writing that simultaneously elevates and diminishes the reverence people often hold toward death. Finn then reflects on the idea of memory: “On the other hand, he knew, memories were often tampered with before they were put back on their shelves. Stories, told enough times, replaced the memories which, once uttered, dissipated and remodeled themselves. It happened at a cellular level: everyone was narratively rewritten” (46). I find the reflection on how we manage our life stories a nice touch, especially since Finn is likely constructing Lily’s story for her throughout the novel as his own way to process his grief.
As depressing as the book is, though, I found it really enriching. It’s so deeply human, so moving, so unique, that it’s hard not to see it as a masterpiece. Moore’s attention to the particulars of relationships and interior worlds, the way she addresses mental illness, and the ear for dialogue all contribute to the best man-and-zombie-ex-go-on-roadtrip book I’ve ever read. In one part of the book, the narrator discusses the idea of sadness and joy and notes that Finn “felt a kind of small joy he had never felt before---an amalgam of old joy and new. Although that was the thing with joy: it was constantly presenting itself as an unprecedented feeling. Every time, you had never felt like this before” (93-94). In context, it refers to the notion that joy is so rare it always feels fresh, but I think it’s also true for the nuances of joy. There is a kind of joy that comes along with depressing stories, a comfort in the light touch of humour in a dark situation. Reading I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a particular kind of pleasure that is hard to replicate.
In reading it, I hope you find joy, too.
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