"How"

When reading “How,” by Lorrie Moore, there is no specific description of what it is a handbook to.  Moore decided not to title it vividly something like “How to leave your husband” or “How to have an affair” but just simply “How” to allow the readers to put it together as they go along.

            Now, when I say the reader that is another part of the story that Moore leaves up to us.  Due to the attitude of the style and the different scenarios that are offered to the reader makes it seem as though this particular piece was written for an advice column of a newspaper, but with the detail that is given to the reader, it seems as though the author is going though the same situation as she is advising on.  This makes me think that it may be more like something that she would’ve written in a diary or a journal to convince herself that what she was doing was right, but also trying to distance herself from the moral concerns she may have with leaving him by offering the alternative scenarios.

            The details into the wife’s thoughts are convincingly realistic to a woman in the character’s position, which supports the journal entry theory: “You will feel passing waves of dependency, and sentimentality.  A week, a month, a year, and he has become you family,”  “You will fantasize about a funeral. At that you could cry.”  These insights into the mind of a woman in this situation are almost too realistic to think that the narrator has not been there.