SOURCE: Moore, Lorrie, and John Blades. “Lorrie Moore: Flipping Death the Bird.” Publishers Weekly 245, no. 34 (24 August 1998): 31.

In the following interview, Blades provides an overview of Moore's personal background, literary career, and fiction upon the publication of Birds of America, and reports Moore's own comments on her life and work.

“Try to be something, anything else,” Lorrie Moore urged would-be writers in her debut short-story collection, Self-Help, published by Knopf in 1985. For those who stubbornly persist in their “unfortunate habit,” Moore had this tip on how to succeed: “Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age—say, 14. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at 15 you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire.”

Moore's dictum came in the story, “How to Be a Writer,” packaged in Self-Help with a half-dozen other seriocomic “how-to” pieces. Perversely enough, Moore was a conspicuous failure only when it...