Short Girl, Short Stories

In class, the main and first question posed to us was “is Aurora a love story?” Personally, my answer is a hard no. Not because it’s an incredibly unhealthy relationship (which also plays a factor because, in my opinion, you need to have some semblance of an actual relationship in order to have a love story), but because that’s not what “Aurora” is about. First and foremost, “Aurora” is Lucero’s story. It simply tells us about his life, and Aurora is simply a part of his life. She’s the only part of his life (that we know of) that he doesn’t feel secure in. He hates himself for always engaging with her, even when he knows he needs to drop her, which leads me to my main point. We already know that Lucero’s love for Aurora is an addiction- we discussed it in class and Diaz even makes a direct comparison in the text. Addiction is everywhere in this story. Everybody is addicted to drugs, Lucero thrives financially on addiction, and he is addicted to a girl who is toxic to ...

For this blog post I decided to focus on “The Kid’s Guide to Divorce”. We only had ~10 minutes to discuss it in class and although I believe there are definitely more explicatable stories in Laurie Moore’s Self-Help , this especially short story is very effective at achieving its goal and worthy of exploration. The purpose of the story is to give its readers a look into divorce and how it affects a family through the eyes of a child. However, instead of telling us directly how it feels and supporting this statement with emotional and anecdotal narrative evidence (think how Baldwin’s narrator in Paris stated plainly that Paris is much better to African Americans than America, and that he was worried about his son Paul), Moore takes a more O’Brien-esque approach. Much like how O’Brien tried to create stories that would invoke in its readers the most similar feeling to wartime experience possible, in “The Kid’s Guide to Divorce” Moore attempts to place us in a child’s position and sho...