Lorrie Moore is late. Fractionally late. She enters the bookstore issuing apologies which hinge on the bedlam of her life. She meets, greets and throws an eye over the crowded confines. "Let's go somewhere good to eat," she says. "You must be hungry." And she turns back towards the door through which she just arrived and begins her navigation through the cheery streets of Madison, battling against ruddy-faced football fans and shoppers from the farmers' market.
There are traces of Lorrie Moore's characters in her personality, but they are lightly drawn and well kicked-over traces. Once, some friends of hers found that their blue dessert plates had turned up in one of her stories. Nothing else from their life, just the dessert plates.
You see little peeks of Lorrie Moore's creations in her personality, but they are just more pieces of unconnected crockery, found things which she has picked up and used. Like many of her characters, she covers a smart, intuitive nature with a burr of self-deprecation, but usually she doesn't bob about on the tide of other people's narratives.
Sometimes the things she says open a little autobiographical window which is too small to climb through.
For instance, she turns out her sharp, clean stories about the small tangles of our times from a room in her house two miles from here in the centre of downtown Madison. Her desk is one of her luxuries, a large L-shaped piece of cherrywood which she had a carpenter create and lay on the tops of filing cabinets. She works facing out a window towards the trees and the squirrels. She explains all this and suddenly she digresses, veering towards a brief thesis on the personality defects of the Midwestern squirrel, an ugly, inbred and charmless fellow.
The mind jumps to the intrusive bushy-tailed rodents in "Real Estate", one of the three extraordinary stories which give such a powerful finish to Birds of America, Moore's recent and triumphant collection. "It was the kind of place where the squirrel mafia would have dumped their off-ed squirrels . . ."
Good company. Lorrie Moore is savvier, more robust, more of an immersed player in life than her sharply drawn stories would suggest. She laughs a lot, makes good jokes born out of mordant wit and meets compliments with a small suspicious feline smile, narrowing her brown eyes, scanning the air for anything counterfeit.
As she slides into a booth at Nick's restaurant she is busy insisting that her local celebrity is non-existent, when the waitress swoops with a confetti of compliments about her work. "Have we ever met before?" says Moore like a magician speaking to an audience member who has just popped the ace of hearts out of his breast pocket.
Moore has lived (and taught) here in Madison, a quaint Midwestern town bounded by two lakes and enlivened by its large university, for fifteen 15 years, but her prose is informed still by her east-coast roots. She was raised in Glens Falls near the Adirondacks in upstate New York, before her family moved to Roosevelt Island, the long sliver of land which occupies the East River between Manhattan and Queens.
Her prose style, the bones of every thought and sentence meticulously picked clean, is the product of her New York years. Before heading to a writers' programme at Cornell University, Moore worked for two years with a New York law firm, spending her days digesting depositions.
"What I did was to take these transcripts of hearings and reduce them to their essence. I would take all these adverbs, adjectives - everything out. I did this for two years and it affected everything. By the time I got to Cornell, I was incapable of writing a big sentence. It even affected my speech. People suspected that I was not a native speaker."
She developed the timbre of her prose voice very early. Paring sentences for eight hours a day helped, but her own impermeable sense of what was interesting and what was worthwhile from what she was reading contributed too.
The list of the people she read in her early twenties (omnivorous gorging, from Charlotte Bronte through Beckett to the short stories of Updike, all underpinned by a prevailing appetite for Alice Munro) is unsurprising, except for her inclusion of the experimentalist Donald Barthelme. Moore's structures and narrative seem too coolly drawn and perfectly drafted for Barthelme to have been an influence.
In the writers' programme at Cornell, Moore was sustained by an insoluble belief in her own ability. The exchange of mimeographed copies of slow-born stories at workshops is an unnerving experience for fragile young writers. Many of Moore's fellow students hated her work, apart from one who critiqued everything he read with the words "more jokes please".
"I never cared," she says. "It taught me to be tough. They were all good writers and well-read and literate. The critiques could be very quiet and delicately phrased and terribly wounding if you let them. I didn't really care. I was 24 and had a very confident feeling about what was good. I learned a lot. I did the two years, I went to every class, never missed one, nobody else had that perfect attendance record. At the end of two years I said, I never want to do this again, so to this day I don't show my work to anyone."
Except, these days, her lawyer husband, upon whose desk she reckons it lies "just a little bit too long", and her agent, who says nice things "because otherwise I won't pay her. Isn't that all a writer wants anyway, praise?"
She taught for two years at Cornell after she finished the writing course and that time was wonderfully productive. She finished her first short story collection, Self Help, and the bulk of her debut novel, Anagrams, during her years there as both student and teacher.
One novel and two short-story collections later, she is a significantly changed writer. Her themes and obsessions remain the same, but the almost too-clever, striving format of the early works has been replaced by an ease with narrative and a trust of subtlety. Harshly, and with slight feelings of guilt, she has disowned her early work.
"A book is a registration of a time in your life, it registers your sense of what is interesting, your sense of story, it records your temperament, your sense of drama, theatre, character. You move on and become a slightly different person. I can't really read my first two books. I can't even open the pages. The cover is just snapped shut, nothing I can do about it. I hope they're not embarrassing, but I have no idea if they are. I can't read them, but I know I would never write them now. It's the work of someone in their 20s."
She seems genuinely uninterested in the snowballing of her career and profile, from the publication five years ago of her second novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital. If Birds of America stands as the inevitable big breakthrough for an irrepressible talent, well, the talent is unmoved.
"I don't know. What does it mean, a breakthrough? Life is exactly the same for me. Birds of America did better than the other books, which was great, but I really believe that has something to do with the short story form and the interest in it. Especially through American universities and writers it has been picked up again as an interesting art form. For me, I still teach and I still pick up my son from school and that's how I'd like it to be. I'm not waiting for some bestseller to come along so I can change my life. Which is lucky, isn't it?"
The penultimate story in Birds of America is Moore's best work yet and touches most rawly on her own life. "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" makes the heart shiver with its naked description of a glacier of sorrow and guilt scraping through a family's life. The ailing child, the mother, a writer and the husband reflect Moore's own domestic line-up. For the year in which her own son Benjamin was ill, the piece was just about all that Moore wrote, all she could write.
In one passage she hits the reader with an ice-pick sentence when the husband, newly informed of his son's condition, says, "Take notes. We are going to need the money." The words and the story's pay-off line have the sting of self-reproach.
The connection is there, Moore admits, but it has been handed over to story-making. She insists the story is not autobiography, but touches on the idea that taking notes is something which is always in the air for a writer. "I was drawing on things I was thinking about in my life. Muddying the line between life and work, toying with it and tampering with it and interrogating it: that's just a transformative aspect of art; you have to recreate it. All writers, no matter what happens in their life, there is a weird thought-cloud hanging over their head, making them take notes. There is a solace, perhaps, of at least being able to use the horrors of your life as fodder for your work, although it wasn't a solace in that particular experience - more of a dilemma.
"But it's not reproach. I'm not standing outside the moment. Yet I know it doesn't take me long after an experience to start thinking of the ways in which the experience might be used as a story. Henry James said, Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost. He was someone on whom many things were lost, but for writers, you want to be in the world taking it all in, but at some moment down the line you will find yourself sitting at your desk. It doesn't separate you from the experience of your life, but reunites you at the desk."
She is on leave again from her teaching post at the University of Wisconsin, toiling through the foothills of a new novel. She is passionate about her fidelity to the importance of the short story, and the habits of the shorter form mould her approach to novel writing.
"I'm not bold enough to set out writing a novel without knowing how it will end. Everything in a short story builds towards the ending, the ending tells you everything. I have to do that with a novel. I don't know if this one will be different, or easier. It's the first I've written with a young child in the house."
Lorrie Moore is back in the bookstore where the afternoon began. She gave a reading here a few nights ago, the first to read on a night of contributions from 20 women writers. By reader number 16, a member of the audience had suffered a seizure. By number 19, the police were arresting a shoplifter.
"He was stealing all the wine, Lorrie," says the man behind the desk. "Not even the books?" she says. "The wine?"
And laughing at the bewildering ways of the world, she slides out into the evening air to buy a birthday-cake for her husband and something to amuse her recovered and boisterous son. A rare talent getting back to the lovely bedlam of her life.
Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore, published by Faber & Faber