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"  &amp;quot;Wild ramp hash!&amp;quot; exclaims Lorrie Moore with delight, then a sigh. Pale-skinned and strikingly pretty, wearing her long brown hair glamorously loose around her shoulders, she&amp;#039;s looking especially chic in a polka-dot blouse\u2014from Shopko, the regional budget retail chain, she tells me, proudly tugging its front when I compliment her on it. Moore, a fiction writer with as fine a bead on contemporary life and relationships and absurdity as anyone writing today, is scanning the menu at L&amp;#039;Etoile, the painstakingly locally sourced restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin, that is the Midwest&amp;#039;s answer to Chez Panisse.  Having lived in Madison and taught creative writing at the University of Wisconsin for 25 years, Moore, 52, has had plenty of time to observe and appreciate this academic, mostly white-collar capital city&amp;#039;s emergence as a hot spot for artisanal food in an otherwise still largely burgerand- fries-addicted state. The quiet, cushioned banquette behind the bar where we&amp;#039;re seated happens to be her favorite spot in town: &amp;quot;It looks like a bordello,&amp;quot; she says, appreciatively plumping the rosy embroidered pillows scattered around us. And wild ramp hash, a faux-modest mash of a newly fetishized vegetable, served tonight alongside lovingly reared pheasant, strikes what she calls her &amp;quot;thieving, churning mind&amp;quot; as exactly right for inclusion in her new novel, a decade in the making\u2014agony for her fans\u2014A Gate at the Stairs.  Set in a city much like Madison, with a restaurant remarkably like L&amp;#039;Etoile, the book pokes gentle fun, as does much of Moore&amp;#039;s fiction, at the semiprecious way high-minded liberal types\u2014and there are many of us here in Madison\u2014crush on whatever trends seem just and proper at the moment (in food, fashion, and politics). This smallish, somewhat self-regarding community is unaccustomed to having its tics and aches exposed for all the world to see\u2014except by Moore, who&amp;#039;s been at it for a while, albeit less frequently than she used to now that she&amp;#039;s a single working mother with a teenage son. And so the novel&amp;#039;s release this month is sure to have more than a few locals scouring its pages for clues to who and what exactly she&amp;#039;s talking about\u2014or, like me, simply gawping with awe at her ability to make so many startling, painful, funny, universally true observations about life&amp;#039;s closely intertwined stings and salvations. Moore has just sent off her final edits on A Gate at the Stairs, and the experience has left her feeling a little bereft. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like you&amp;#039;ve had this 10-year dream,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;And now you have to put on clean clothes and talk about it, and the more you talk about it, the less you can remember.&amp;quot;  Then, as is her habit in person and in her fiction, Moore both underlines the poignancy of the moment\u2014in this case, missing a tasty phrase because time ran out\u2014and also softens her regret with a spot-on wisecrack: &amp;quot;I want to see a big highway sign that says WILD RAMP HASH,&amp;quot; she says, laughing in her lovely, easily activated high lilt at the ain&amp;#039;t-never-gonna-happen thought of such a billboard cropping up in Burgerland.   Moore grew up in the small upstate New York town of Glens Falls, gateway to the Adirondacks, &amp;quot;shy and very watchful as a child, and a reader\u2014typical of a writer,&amp;quot; she says. Her parents performed in an amateur theater group, and watching &amp;quot;grown-ups fall in and out of character, or burst into song or laughter,&amp;quot; she once told The Paris Review, &amp;quot;were probably the most enchanted and culturally formative moments of my childhood.&amp;quot; Compared with her students, who are often still deeply involved with their parents, Moore says she had a more formal, old-fashioned relationship with hers\u2014which helped her make the &amp;quot;romantic and bloody-minded&amp;quot; decision to commit wholly to her art when she started writing seriously in college. (&amp;quot;The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, `Write something you&amp;#039;d never show your mother or father.&amp;#039; And you know what they say?&amp;quot; she says, wide-eyed with disbelief. &amp;quot; `I could never do that!&amp;#039;&amp;quot;)  In her early twenties, Moore worked in Manhattan as a paralegal, and more than any writer I can think of, she has floored me over the years with her canary-in-a-coalmine way of previewing, a decade ahead of my own experience, the dips, swerves, and occasional full-body slams life holds in store for a certain kind of sensitively striving woman. First came Self-Help (1985), her debut collection of stories, mostly written while she was a grad student at Cornell. (Moore&amp;#039;s thesis adviser, Alison Lurie, steered her to her own agent, who quickly signed her.) Full of tales of young women embarking on careers and relationships\u2014 often shakily: &amp;quot;Shave your legs in the bathroom sink. Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition,&amp;quot; goes a line from &amp;quot;How to Be an Other Woman&amp;quot;\u2014the book suggested how a Wisconsin-born, New York\u2013bound girl like me might survive big-city indignities with her sense of irony intact.  In the high-pressure, low-prospect late &amp;#039;80s, my college friends and I underlined our copies of this groundbreakingly raw but also blessedly silly book as vigorously as seekers in the &amp;#039;60s marked up Sex and the Single Girl\u2014clear on the fact that Moore, for all her love of generously hammy jokes, had the only truly evolved grip on modern female experience. Victoria Wilson, who has been Moore&amp;#039;s editor at Knopf from the beginning, remembers thinking, while reading that first batch of grad-school stories, &amp;quot;She just has it\u2014a way of seeing that combines perfect on-point humor with rage.&amp;quot; By now, Wilson adds, many have tried to imitate her. &amp;quot;Something like Juno\u2014to me, that script was an attempt to write like Moore. But she is who she is. She just has that voice that&amp;#039;s like no one else&amp;#039;s.&amp;quot;  When Moore&amp;#039;s second collection, Like Life, came out in 1990, I was living in New York City. I did frown when one of her characters\u2014 a young East Coast historian transplanted to a small Midwestern college in &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re Ugly, Too&amp;quot;\u2014described her students as &amp;quot;spacey with estrogen from large quantities of meat and cheese.&amp;quot; (Wait, the Dairylander in me wondered. Do we really look as dull-eyed as our cows?) Mostly, though, her dark take on the Big Apple&amp;#039;s way of dishing out disappointment illuminated aspects of the world I&amp;#039;d walked into with startling honesty. In Like Life&amp;#039;s title story, the narrator, with more disgust than sympathy, observes her struggling-artist husband trying desperately to chat up gallerists at art openings in a pair of secondhand leather pants that &amp;quot;he looked terrible in.&amp;quot; Ouch. I think I dated that guy more than once\u2014or maybe I was that guy myself.   With two innovative novels also under her belt\u2014Anagrams (1986) and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), about which The New York Times&amp;#039; legendarily tough critic Michiko Kakutani (who panned Anagrams) noted Moore had &amp;quot;fully come into her own as a writer,&amp;quot; using not only &amp;quot;her full spectrum of revealed talents&amp;quot; but also &amp;quot;new gifts of lyricism and tenderness at the same time&amp;quot;\u2014Moore published her next shortstory collection, Birds of America, in 1998. Deeper, funnier, and even more searingly tuned to the ambivalence and fury burrowing under relationships than anything she&amp;#039;d written previously\u2014Kakutani, tripping all over herself to string together praiseful adjectives, called it &amp;quot;sad, funny, lyrical, and prickly,&amp;quot; as well as &amp;quot;wise and beguiling&amp;quot;\u2014Birds included the much-buzzed-about semiautobiographical heartbreaker &amp;quot;People Like That Are the Only People Here,&amp;quot; about a couple coping with their young son&amp;#039;s cancer. (Moore and her husband at the time\u2014they divorced in 2001\u2014saw their own son, Benjamin, now 15, through a similar ordeal.)  Birds spent several weeks on best-seller lists, a fairly rare feat for a story collection. Deborah Treisman, The New Yorker&amp;#039;s fiction editor, says that while Moore has a gift for tackling &amp;quot; female&amp;quot; topics such as mating and motherhood, no one would &amp;quot;dismiss her work as chick lit.&amp;quot; A true mold-breaker, Moore is also &amp;quot;a bit of a throwback\u2014a social observer of the kind you had in the nineteenth century, dealing with awkward moments of connection, strangers who thought they were friends but turn out not to be,&amp;quot; Treisman says. &amp;quot;So much of her work is about society, looking at the rules of the game. She&amp;#039;s fantastic at parties,&amp;quot; capturing small talk\u2014&amp;quot;so much more complicated than [it looks]&amp;quot;\u2014under which, steadily, emotional bombs are &amp;quot;blowing up.&amp;quot;  At a moment when book publishing badly needs a hit, there&amp;#039;s extra pressure on Moore to knock another one out of the park with A Gate at the Stairs. Despite being convivial and engaging, Moore repeatedly tells me she&amp;#039;s a boring person without much to say. She gibes at herself for being a jittery interviewee after toiling so long, albeit in fits and starts, in the study of the drafty 1909 house that she shares with Benjamin not far from campus. &amp;quot;This is what happens to writers. They go from being invisible to being, `Hey, my shirt is from Shopko!&amp;#039; &amp;quot; She thinks people in town don&amp;#039;t recognize her or treat her with any special celebrity deference. But with her good looks and stylish clothing (Madison is a pilly fleece kind of place), she does turn heads. When we&amp;#039;re out at a bar on another evening and Moore is checking out the drink card with her sunglasses on (they&amp;#039;re prescription and help her with reading, too), I see a man on her other side elbow his wife, who nods, having already spotted Madison&amp;#039;s leading literary light seated down the line\u2014and not looking especially happy about it.  &amp;quot;Uh-uh!&amp;quot; was Moore&amp;#039;s reaction to the prospect of becoming the youngest faculty member of the UW English department at age 27. But the work, she says, gives her a lot of pleasure. &amp;quot;You get to be with these pleasant, smart young people who teach you all kinds of things.&amp;quot; After a pause, she adds a thought about writing. &amp;quot;Ideally, you should have stretches when you are allowed to stay in your bathrobe for a month. But is that mentally healthy? No.&amp;quot;   Moore talks often and affectionately of her students\u2014she recently brought a graduating MFA class to L&amp;#039;Etoile to celebrate\u2014 and says she&amp;#039;s often quite silly as an instructor. But along with being funny, she is also &amp;quot;very honest and very encouraging,&amp;quot; says Dean Bakopoulos, a former student and now regular coffee or beer pal of Moore&amp;#039;s and author of a memorable 2005 debut novel, Please Don&amp;#039;t Come Back From the Moon. Laughing, Bakopoulos recalls how Moore, at the end of one class, had everyone sit in a circle and &amp;quot;satirize the tics and tendencies&amp;quot; of the writer seated to the left\u2014 &amp;quot;and unfortunately I was sitting to the left of Lorrie.&amp;quot; Her piece, imitating his tendency to overreach at the end of a story &amp;quot;for that soaring moment\u2014and if it&amp;#039;s not there, to keep pushing it there with language,&amp;quot; initially knocked him for a loop. &amp;quot;I thought, Ah, shit! I write just like that. But it was very effective as a teaching tool. It made me feel that writing was less a life-and-death situation than a craft you learn slowly.&amp;quot; The other big tug on Moore&amp;#039;s time is her son&amp;#039;s soccer career. To her surprise (and occasional concern), Benjamin, whose health she will only describe now as still &amp;quot;delicate,&amp;quot; has become a hard-core jock. Moore used to bring The New York Review of Books (to which she often contributes essays and book reviews) to his kiddie scrums. But as the games became more exciting\u2014Benjamin has become so accomplished that he has played on U.S. national youth teams in international competition\u2014reading was out &amp;quot; because you have to watch, and you want to watch.&amp;quot; Even so, juggling the soccer schedule\u2014some weeks, five games\u2014on top of teaching and her various other responsibilities is tough. &amp;quot;Trying to get writing done when you&amp;#039;re a single mother with a job...I can make myself completely hysterical on this subject. And let&amp;#039;s face it\u2014it&amp;#039;s been 11 years since my last book,&amp;quot; she says, almost apologetically. A Gate at the Stairs records the coming-of-age of Tassie Keltjin, a smart, searching, lonely farm-town girl attending a large Midwestern university in a city Moore calls Troy that&amp;#039;s identifiably Madison in many ways. (But, hey: Troy beats &amp;quot;Beersboro,&amp;quot; the name Moore gave another Midwestern city in a recent New Yorker story.) Tassie&amp;#039;s father grows fancy potatoes (&amp;quot;Special food for special people!&amp;quot; Tassie cracks) for posh Chicago restaurants and Petite Moulin, the artisanal joint that\u2014bingo\u2014I&amp;#039;ve correctly guessed is modeled on L&amp;#039;Etoile. (&amp;quot;Sure, I thought a little bit of this place,&amp;quot; says Moore, nodding perhaps a bit wearily.) Coincidentally, Tassie goes to work for Sarah Brink, Petite Moulin&amp;#039;s frazzled owner/chef, as a nanny for the two-year-old mixed-race girl that Sarah and her caddish husband, Edward, have adopted together. Set in the year following 9/11, A Gate at the Stairs deftly captures several uncomfortable realities: the isolation of a self-conscious young woman discovering independence, sexuality, and heartbreak mostly on her own; the brittle fragility and undoing of a marriage that has never recovered from a serious hardship (Sarah and Edward share a dark past that comes back to haunt them); the vulnerability of children (especially those with overworked, unequally enthusiastic parents); the wheel-spinning ineffectuality of well-meaning liberals attempting to cure social ills; and the tragedy of war.  Throughout her career, Moore has focused on her characters&amp;#039; inner lives\u2014women at first, later men and women with equal perspicacity\u2014going through experiences roughly in sync with her own life stages: dating, marriage, divorce, dating after divorce. (Moore has been seeing a local artist on and off for eight years; still, a trio of smokingly sad, brightly bitter short stories published in The New Yorker since 2003 indicate she well knows what a bitch battle-scarred, middle-aged partnering can be, especially in a smallish town where the dating pool is fished out fast.) When I ask Moore why she chose to write about someone Tassie&amp;#039;s age, on the eve of adulthood, her explanation helps me better understand why I found her slow-building sense of self in the novel so unexpectedly stirring. When you &amp;quot;talk about what a 20-year-old goes through,&amp;quot; says Moore, &amp;quot;basically you&amp;#039;re talking about things that remain very intense through the rest of your life. You&amp;#039;re talking about the discovery of hypocrisy, how it enrages you. Even when you&amp;#039;re 50 and you have those feelings, it makes you feel like you&amp;#039;re 20 again. You&amp;#039;re like, What?! Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about relationships and about the world that enables them to say, `No, you lied to me. Goodbye.&amp;#039; When they see wickedness, they walk away.&amp;quot;  Moore won&amp;#039;t discuss the unraveling of her own marriage. But from things she&amp;#039;s said in the past\u2014she told The Guardian last year, &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s an asshole. He actually does it for a living. It&amp;#039;s amazing that people can get paid for that, but he can&amp;quot; (he&amp;#039;s a divorce lawyer in Madison, for what it&amp;#039;s worth)\u2014it&amp;#039;s not a great leap to suppose that Moore also has deep sympathies for Sarah, who tries, with increasing difficulty, to hold her chin up while her husband hits on younger women in the couple&amp;#039;s orbit, including, eventually, Tassie. Along with exploring &amp;quot;interesting impulses&amp;quot; in a &amp;quot;progressive community&amp;quot; like Madison that she &amp;quot;thought were vain and hypocritical and admirable,&amp;quot; Moore says she wanted to write about &amp;quot;Hello! Yet again, marriage and the injustices in it.&amp;quot;  Moore understands that people want to know how a writer comes up with her stuff, &amp;quot;the story of the story&amp;quot;\u2014a curiosity she has termed almost &amp;quot;mammalian.&amp;quot; But in her version of the standard disclaimer, she steadfastly denies that Troy is really Madison, or that Tassie, or Sarah, or anyone else described in the book has any direct relationship to any actual person, living or dead. Rather than coming from some urge to faithfully record reality, her stories spring &amp;quot;from a moment that has somehow jolted my life\u2014something has pounded against my heart,&amp;quot; she says, demonstrating with a fistthump to her chest. From there, she fleshes out the jolts with characters and language that can come from almost anywhere: &amp;quot;A simile or a metaphor might come from washing dishes or grocery shopping. These are chores, but you have to do them, and they present little encounters with language that help.&amp;quot; She adds, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief\u2014I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that&amp;#039;s what I want to do. I&amp;#039;m running away to an invented place.&amp;quot;   For all Moore&amp;#039;s willingness to look long and hard at people&amp;#039;s flaws, regional and otherwise, she also, as Deborah Treisman notes, never condescends to her subjects: &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s always a warmth, even when her characters are ridiculous.&amp;quot;  Still, whatever she writes, Moore will probably always rub some people the wrong way. When I ask her where her courage comes from, she corrects me. &amp;quot;The detachment of the artist is kind of creepy. It&amp;#039;s kind of rude, and yet really it&amp;#039;s where art comes from. It&amp;#039;s not the same as courage. It&amp;#039;s closer to bad manners than to courage. Or it&amp;#039;s just some willingness to, you know, take a few rotten tomatoes flung your way. You&amp;#039;re going to offend somebody, and you have to be prepared for it. You have to be prepared to say, `Oh, no. I swear to God that wasn&amp;#039;t you. I&amp;#039;m sorry.&amp;#039; Because it isn&amp;#039;t them. It can be a mess. But if you&amp;#039;re going to be a writer, you basically have to say, `This is just who I am, and this is what I am going to do.&amp;#039; There&amp;#039;s a certain indefensibility about it. It&amp;#039;s not about loving your community and taking care of it\u2014you&amp;#039;re not attached to the chamber of commerce. It&amp;#039;s a little unsafe.&amp;quot; She shrugs and laughs. &amp;quot;You have to be willing to have only four friends, not 11.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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