I must be honest: after picking this book up, I let it fester in my bag for a good week or two. One day, sitting idly in a train, I finally pulled it out - "Just read the first chapter, see if you'll like it," I told myself - forgetting the fact that I am prone to motion sickness. I was quickly reminded of this, but by then I was well past Chapter One and I just could not put the book down, even when hints of queasiness threatened to overtake me. (Upon arriving at my destination, I had to take a couple hours to recover.)
 
Lorrie Moore had me at a small sentence in which the narrator declares, "My brain was on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir." And off we went, the narrator and I, into her story as a 20-year-old midwestern college student who finds herself journeying into the strange fray of adulthood, made even stranger because she must do so following the fall of the Twin Towers. Through her, we encounter all different manners of love and confront all ideas of right or wrong, all ambiguous and far away from the black-and-white spectrum of childhood.
 
This book was a book of feeling, and one that deserves a comfortable chair and a period of time where you know with absolute certainty that you will not be sick.
 
Jessica L.

A Gate at the Stairs (Hardcover)

By Lorrie Moore

$25.95

ISBN-13: 9780375409288
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Knopf, 09/01/2009

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