A Gate at the Stairs-- Book #2

A Gate at the Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

Alfred A. Knopf

When Isabel Allende heard her grandfather was dying, she sat down to write him a letter. (This story comes from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac on NPR.) The first sentence became the first sentence of her book The House of the Spirits. Since that time, she begins all of her novels on January 8, the date she wrote that first sentence. The first sentence determines the path of the new book.

This is a long way of saying what Dorothy tells Jerry Maguire. "You had me at 'hello.' "

Lorrie Moore had me at the first sentence of her 2009 book, A Gate at the Stairs. "The cold came late that fall and the songbirds were caught off guard."

I thought of Isabel Allende the minute I read that sentence. I thought of Dorothy much later. What a sentence. I had to go back to the inside cover flap to read what what this book was about. Remember, I just went to the library and got whatever The Washington Post listed as the ten best of 2009.

Ah, yes. I wrapped myself up in my grandmother's afghan and settled in for some fun. Especially welcome after The Stalin Epigram (only half read.) I didn't get far; it was 3 in the morning and I needed to read something, anything but Epigram.

What I got was 30 pages of fun: a charming college student far from her family's truck farm and the beginning of her new job as nanny.

Thirty pages of beautiful sentences touched off by that very first sentence about the cold and songbirds.