I’m currently reading Lorrie Moore’s stunning short story collection, Birds of America. This morning on the train, I read “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” which I’d actually read once before, I think in my freshman fiction writing workshop. It can be a tough story to get through because of its subject matter, pediatric cancer, but it’s a masterful work. (It won the O. Henry Award for Moore in 1998.) Here’s a small bit:
Sifting through the videocassettes, the Mother wonders what science fiction could begin to compete with the science fiction of cancer itself — a tumor with its differentiated muscle and bone cells, a clump of wild nothing and its mad, ambitious desire to be something: something inside you, instead of you, another organism, but with a monster’s architecture, a demon’s sabotage and chaos. Think of leukemia, a tumor diabolically taking liquid form, better to swim about incognito in the blood. George Lucas, direct that!