Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
How do you put a pin on what one’s childhood is “like”? Similar to Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye or an Alice Munro story, or maybe Anne Enright’s novel What Are You Like?, this Lorrie Moore novel — Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, my first Lorrie Moore (!) — takes all those nebulous emotions that surface while reminiscing and somehow decorates them with prose that just seems to make sense.
“My childhood had no narrative; it was all just a combination of air and no air: waiting for life to happen, the body to get big, the mind to grow fearless. There were no stories, no ideas, not really, not yet. Just things unearthed from elsewhere and propped up later to help the mind get around. At the time, however, it was liquid, like a song—nothing much. It was just a space with some people in it.”
And then you become an adult and realize that all those incredibly random incidents and people and scenes somehow tally together in weird ways to create the narrative of your youth because “Things, I know, stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before.”
{I have Moore’s much-anticipated latest, I Am Homeless if This is Not My Home, on reserve from our library. Will I get to check it out before we move? We shall see…maybe this has become my new countdown measurement. ⏱️⏰}
originally published on instagram