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    I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home: A novel
    I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home: A novel
    I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home: A novel
    Audiobook6 hours

    I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home: A novel

    Written by Lorrie Moore

    Narrated by Sophie Amoss

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ • From “one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation” (The New York Times)—a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things—seen and unseen.

    A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, NPR, Vulture, Lit Hub

    “Who else but Lorrie Moore could make, in razor-sharp irresistible prose, a ghost story about death buoyant with life?” —PEOPLE

    “Is it an allegory? Is it real? It doesn’t matter...[It’s] a novel with big questions, no answers, and it’s absolutely brilliant.” —Lit Hub

    “[A] triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination.” —The Guardian

    Lorrie Moore’s first novel since A Gate at the Stairs—a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart

    A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all...

    With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore has given us a magic box of longing and surprise as she writes about love and rebirth and the pull towards life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings as it questions the stories we have been told which may or may not be true.

    I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home takes us through a trap door, into a windswept, imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
    Release dateJun 20, 2023
    ISBN9780593821046
    Author

    Lorrie Moore

    LORRIE MOORE is the author of the story collections Bark,Birds of America,Like Life, and Self-Help and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams. Her work has won honors from the Lannan Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Irish Times International Prize for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the PEN/Malamud Award.

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    Reviews for I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

    3.5/5

    69 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Wonderful book. Best I have read in a while.
    • 4/5
      “Each of these stars is a star that died. Or could be. Are they in conversation? Part of a design? They each seem unaware of the others. And since you don’t know whether they’re dead or alive— their lives are many years further back than their look of life— their shine for us on earth is all the same whether we’re looking at dead shine or live shine. Starlight is simply performative.”

      Finn, a high school teacher fond of conspiracy theories, visits his terminally ill older brother Max in hospice in the Bronx. They reminisce and Finn ponders over the impending loss of his brother and how they had drifted apart in their adult years. In the course of his visit, he receives disturbing news concerning his ex Lily, a therapy clown by profession who had been struggling with mental issues and whom he still loves. Finn leaves his brother watching the World Series confident that his brother will be alive the next time he visits and returns to Chicago fearing the worst. What follows is a most unusual cross-country road trip that has Finn reflecting on the ups and downs of his relationship with Lily and how they treated one another and themselves while they were together. Lily and Max are the most important people in his life and Finn’s journey as he grapples with his reality is one of love, loss, acceptance and learning to move on.

      Interspersed throughout the novel are a few letters written by a woman named Elizabeth who ran a boarding house, to her sister in the post-Civil War years. The contents of the letters comprise a story in epistolary format, revolving around a guest in the boarding house who sparks Elizabeth’s interests. But when she begins to suspect his true identity, she is compelled to take matters into her own hands.

      Imaginative and unique, with elegant prose in a dream-like narrative, I Am Homeless if This is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore is an absorbing read touching upon themes of family, life, death, loss, mental health and grief. In turn absurdist and bizarre laced with dark humor yet insightful and heartbreaking, this is an unusual novel, but I mean that in a good way. The two narratives are somewhat disjointed, intersecting briefly and though I can’t say that I felt they were much impacted by one another, I did enjoy the boardinghouse story for its humor and intrigue and ultimately its message. I would have liked it if the segment on Max and Finn had been explored in more depth, but overall I found this short novel to be an impactful read.

      Many thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the digital review copy of this novel. All opinions expressed in this review are own.

      “Did anyone really know what the story of a human life ever was? There were so many competing and intersecting and sometimes parallel and obliterating narratives. He sat there as remarks about life and death swirled around him. In life’s wrestle with death there was much suffering, and in death a diabolical vanishing. Suffering then vanishing. Suffering then vanishing. Did everyone understand that’s what they had signed up for, or really just not signed up at all but been drafted? Life was soldiering. Death was disappearance. Death sure had the power move. It had the black cape, the fine print, and the magic tricks.”
    • 4/5
      Beautiful writing, but the last 75 pages or so just get kind of rambly
    • 3/5
      [2.25 stars] I often assign an extra star to a book that is creatively bizarre. Sadly, Moore’s book was boringly bizarre. It came dangerously close to landing on my DNF list. If this slim volume had been even 50 pages longer, I likely would have called it quits. I guess a narrative based on a road trip with a witty cadaver just isn’t my thing. I did find the dynamic between the protagonist and his dying brother to be intriguing, and I must admit the storyline is certainly "different." But at least three-quarters of this strange literary concoction simply didn’t resonate with me -- to the extent that I had no incentive to even try to understand the underlying messages. On a positive note, Moore is clearly an accomplished wordsmith.
    • 3/5
      I kept having a sense of familiarity reading this book. Perhaps appropriate given its themes of the past persisting into the present in a sometimes creepy way... but I have to assume that the author didn't intend to evoke both American Gods and Lincoln in the Bardo so obviously. (The Faulkner references were clearly intentional.) Or perhaps that is only a reflection of my own personal history of reading about the undead haunting the landscape of America? Anyway, I liked it well enough. It made me chuckle from time to time. I just wish it added up to more than a collection of clever phrases and mordant thoughts stitched together in the vague shape of a novel.
    • 2/5
      Bizarre story about death with alternating timelines that do meet up but do not meld.
    • 3/5
      When he looked at other couples, he did not know how they tolerated each other. They had just grown accustomed, he guessed. They had cooked each other. Each was the frog and each was the heated water. Still, he envied them a tiny bit. Their love in pots.

      This novel follows two timelines. The first is letters from a woman living in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War who runs a boarding house. She misses her sister and is courted by one of her lodgers. The other concerns Finn, who goes to New York to sit with his brother who is in hospice care. Finn was in a long relationship with a manic pixie dream girl-type, although she seemed far more manic than dream girl. He's still not over her although she is involved with another man. When a mutual acquaintance calls and tells him he needs to return immediately, he leaves his dying brother and drives back to Chicago only to find the worst has happened.

      This is an odd little book. Moore is known for her short stories and the epistolary sections feel like a full story in their own right. In the Finn sections, which form the majority of the book, Moore lets the constraints of reality go and tells a story that is fantastical and absurd, veering off into odd tangents. There's no doubt that Moore is an extraordinarily gifted writer, and if you're a fan of writers like Jesse Ball or J. Robert Lennon, you will probably like this novel.
    • 2/5
      I found the title to Lorrie Moore’s book I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home very strange and difficult to remember and then I read it; now I realize that anyone put off by the title should definitely not tangle with this novel. Finn is struggling to make a connection with his brother who is dying in hospice but gets called back to his hometown after his ex commits suicide. The bulk of the book consists of a convoluted conversation between them as he drives her to her final resting place. Oh right — interspersed within are letters written from Elizabeth to her dead sister in what seems like around the early 1900s. Obviously this is a very odd little book with no plot, but Moore’s writing is electric, funny, and she has undoubtedly created an interesting character. It is definitely not for everyone.