Lorrie Moore's "Self-Help"

I've been reading Lorrie Moore's short stories collection called "Self-Help." The stories are good individually, but reading them back to back can get a little boring. She is a bit repetitious, recycling the same themes like adultery and cancer over and over. She sometimes uses second-person narrative, which she does well. Despite the repetition I find it a real page-turner.

The story I just read this afternoon is called "Amahl and the Night Visitors: A Guide to the Tenor of Love." It is about a woman in a dysfunctional relationship with an opera singer, who is convinced that her boyfriend is having an affair with someone else. I read it out loud, and bursted out laughing unexpectedly at one point. Her joke caught me off-guard. Later the opposite happened; I came across a sentence that made me start crying.

I'm not going to quote the sentence because somebody might want to read it, and I do hope that you do read this collection. But the sentence struck me because it says something to me so directly. It didn't offer anything that never crossed my mind before. Instead it said something that I have heard myself say before, maybe in my journal, or out loud to myself. It made me think of people I had loved, who had left. Sometimes you come across a work of art that speaks so honestly, and speaks directly at you, right to your heart, and it affects you so tremendously. That's when the most powerful form of catharsis happens.

Whoever you are, if you read, I hope you find something that touches you, that affects you. I have this ability to kind of feel along with anything I read, but only once in a while does something sweep me over like this. I know I would be reading anyway even if moments like this never happens. But when it does, gosh, it reminds me why I love reading.