What critics are saying about Lorrie Moore's 'I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home'

Lorrie Moore's latest novel, one of the summer's most anticipated releases, finally arrived last month. "I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home" is her first novel since 2009, and fans of her short stories were excited to see her work in a larger context. The book weaves together a ghost story, travelogue and series of 19th-century letters to tell a story about love and loss while reckoning with death. Moore's "thoughtful and witty" novel will delight her fans, and "those new to Moore will want to see what else they've been missing," Publisher's Weekly stated in a review. 

The book follows Finn, a recently suspended high school teacher, who begins his journey at his terminally ill brother's bedside in New York City. When he receives a message that his ex Lily has committed suicide, he rushes back to his Midwest hometown. But when he arrives at her grave, Lily is still "alive," despite being in the early stages of decomposition. The pair embark on a cross-country journey to a "body farm" in Tennessee, where she can donate her body to science. Their high jinks are interspersed with letters from a 19th-century boarding house proprietor to her sister in the years after the Civil War. 

"I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home" is "fluky, fitfully funny and folk-horror-adjacent," Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times. Moore's prose has always stood out because she's a "consummate user of the English language," Garner noted. "Her moisture-wicking sentences confirm and reconfirm your sanity." While he doesn't typically give books a grade in reviews, while reading Moore's latest, Garner found himself thinking about how he would rank it. Moore's book is an "easy A" compared to other fiction published this year. However, "in terms of Moore's own high standards," her latest novel is a "C at best."

Readers will likely find the "diaphanous ghost story" and its "curious, unraveling structure" too odd, Parul Sehgal surmised in The New Yorker. At some point, like Finn's zombie ex, Lily, "the novel itself begins to come apart," and as you progress through the pages, "the story does not build or cohere," Sehgal added. "It degrades." Still, it might be to the story's benefit as Moore pushes the boundaries of the structure. In her "death-defying" novel, Moore "assembles her puns and her false mustaches, readies her troupe and finds a way to rewrite the most inexorably linear story of all."

Moore's novel is "off-kilter from the beginning," Judith Shulevitz wrote in The Atlantic. "Its very structure disorients." Readers won't "understand this novel if you read it only once," she warned. "I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home" is "dense with allusion," and its two storylines "don't fit together neatly," Shulevitz added. "But life is like that, and death even more so." Still, that shouldn't discourage readers from enjoying the book. "Moore has made death elating, and that's a pretty good trick."

Moore's latest "resists analysis," Constance Grady wrote on Vox. "This is a novel made out of air, unstructured, unskeletoned." Summarizing the central plot "doesn't quite get at what the experience of reading this weird, funny, tender and occasionally gross book is like." It's a "strange and beautiful book," Grady raved. "And when you try to catch it in your hands, it dissolves."