Emotional Acuity in Lorrie Moore’s “How to be an Other Woman” from Self-Help

Abstract

Lorrie Moore is one of the famous fictionists of contemporary America. Using the first-and-second-person narratives and shuttling of narrative between past and present, she proves herself a typical postmodernist even in her first collection of short stories titled Self-Help published in 1985. She does not brand herself a feminist, yet woman related issues are dealt by her in almost all the stories in this collection. While focusing her attention on women issues, she relates them to the world which is overflowed with various internal and external relationships. Man-woman relationship in love, marriage and in extra-marital relationship determines woman’s position in the family as well as the society. Hence with the strained relationships the women of Moore suffer from a kind of psychological imbalance and mental turmoil. The protagonist, Charlene of the short story titled “How to be an Other Woman” is obsessed with the thought, being a mistress to a married man and hence suffers from guilty consciousness.