BOOK REVIEW – Bark by Lorrie Moore
I’ve always had a soft spot for short stories. Maybe it started with those condensed Reader’s Digest books that were scattered around my house growing up—bite-sized fiction for people too busy or bored for the long haul. Or maybe it had more to do with the way my friends mocked me for carrying around anything with more than 200 pages, calling it a “thick book” like it was a communicable disease. Apparently, thick books were repellents to romance. No girl, they assured me, would ever date a “nerd” with a copy of East of Eden tucked under his arm.
Decades later, I’m still reading short stories—and still waiting on that alleged dating drought to clear. The difference now is that I no longer care what anyone thinks. I’ve read some of the best, weirdest, most emotionally devastating stories in 8 pages or less. And honestly, what could be more efficient?
This year, I made a decision: track everything. I usually read short stories and essays like most people eat chips—absentmindedly, with no real sense of portion control. But this time, I took inventory. And something strange happened. I began discovering (and rediscovering) writers who’ve been doing the short form justice in ways I hadn’t fully appreciated. Yes, I revisited the usual suspects—Carver, O’Connor, Gordon Weaver—but I also found gems in writers like Tom Perrotta, Richard Ford, Laura Lippman, and even Dean Koontz, whose short fiction turns out to be tighter and more disciplined than his novels let on.
Which brings me to Lorrie Moore—and specifically, her collection Bark.
Now, I vaguely remembered Moore from some college class where I half-read You’re Ugly, Too while trying to fake my way through a discussion on tone. My professor looked at me as if I had committed one of the seven deadly sins. After class, the dreaded question, “Is this what I’m to expect from you this semester?” I could tell she wanted to say,” Young man,” but we were around the same age. But Bark isn’t a collection you can bluff through. It’s sharp. It’s bitter. It’s funny in that dry, bruised way that makes you wince a little before you laugh.
The collection, published in 2014, features eight stories. They’re mostly about love, or more precisely, the slow, embarrassing death of it. Divorcees, lonely professionals, aging idealists—these are Moore’s people. Her characters aren’t exactly likable, and that’s the point. They’re painfully human, clinging to their snark and sarcasm the way you’d clutch a floatation device on a sinking ship.
In the opening story, “Debarking,” we meet Ira, a recently divorced man who jumps into a relationship with a woman who might be clinically unstable—or just your average person dating post-40. It’s absurd and cringy and, somehow, still tender. Then there’s “Paper Losses,” a story about a woman trying to escape a failing marriage by taking a doomed family vacation, and “Wings,” which is part existential crisis, part strange love story involving a dying neighbor.
What Moore does best is this: she lets you laugh right before she smacks you in the heart. Her sentences coil and snap. She has no interest in clean endings or moral takeaways. Her characters stumble into revelations they’re not even sure they want. And while the themes—disconnection, aging, heartbreak—aren’t new, Moore makes them feel freshly bleak and oddly comforting.
Reading Bark reminded me why I fell in love with short stories in the first place. There’s something thrilling about getting gut-punched in under twenty pages. It’s like sitting in on a semester-long writing workshop, except Moore doesn’t hold your hand or soften the blow. She just hands you the raw material, laughs quietly, and moves on.
It also forced me to take a hard look at my bookshelf. I’ve spent years telling aspiring writers to read the greats, study their rhythm, learn from their cuts. And yet here I was, returning to Moore and realizing I’d been coasting—reading without re-reading, appreciating without absorbing.
The best short stories don’t just entertain. They shake something loose. They leave you sitting quietly afterward, staring into the middle distance like you’ve just come out of a blackout. And if they’re really good, you thank them for the damage.
Bark is that kind of collection.
So, yes—read it. Especially if you’ve ever been in love, fallen out of it, or stared across a dinner table wondering when everything got so damn quiet. Just don’t expect happy endings. Moore’s not that kind of writer. And honestly, life’s not that kind of story either.