#419 The Juniper Tree- Lorrie Moore

#419 The Juniper Tree- Lorrie Moore

Robin Ross has died over night, she was suffering in the hospital a week before finally succumbing to cancer. He goof friend was going to visit the night before she died, but it was late and she decided not go, now she will never have a chance to say goodbye.

This story is a dream, or a mental hallucination, a creation born of anxiety and guilt. She imagines Robin coming back as a ghost for one day so she and her friends can have one more night of drinking together. She tries to put her own life in perspective, feeling inadequate.

“In rejecting the lives of our mothers, we found ourselves looking for stray volts of mother love in the very places they could never be found: gin, men, the college, our mothers, and one another.”

Notable Passage: “Somewhere inside us we were joyful orphans: our lives were right, we were zooming along doing what we wanted, we were sometimes doing what we loved. But we were inadequate as a pit crew for ourselves, or anyone else.”

Rating: 8-8-7-7 Total= 30