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Lorrie Moore writes in her introduction to See What Can Be Done that, at the start of her career, she couldn’t turn down book reviews Likewise, I shouldn’t be doing this but I am There is no introduction more fitting to Moore’s work than the sentence: ‘I shouldn’t be doing this’ Presently, announcing my love for her feels like a quaint throwback, like expressing my admiration for the microwave If this were a love affair I would be showing up late at night, keeping it quiet, cautiously saying, ‘Don’t tell anyone I’m here’ But I would be showing up Anyway, you need to read only one page of her, one paragraph, to know that those relationships, the faintly disastrous and embarrassing, are the ones you don’t get over   Moore is not a particularly demonstrative writer, not didactic, and she communicates no clear, distinct vision of the world She’s interested in confusion, in what she terms ‘elegant wrongness’ She has a relatively slim output in comparison to others, five story collections and two novels, only one of them of significant length (Gate at the Stairs, but I prefer her first, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?) The art form she most succeeds at is the shyest – the short story The second art form she truly succeeds at is the book review, where she obscures herself and hides in the back, behind a list of bigger names: Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo So what’s to be taken from her first collection of essays, criticism and commentary, gathered over her thirty-year career?   Firstly, before matters of the heart, practical business – how to read this brick? I grouped the pieces into book criticism, then her work on television and film, her political pieces then, finally, music I left the autobiography to last But what’s to be taken from this book, really? With Moore, I think there is always that italicised ‘really’ How did it really feel – not how was it supposed to feel, not how did it sound, but how did it really feel? She would baulk at the idea that