Degrees of Nakedness: Stories

by Lisa Moore

In Lisa Moore's first story collection, the joys and distresses of love course through modern-day Newfoundland like an electric current. These bright, engaging tales mark precious moments in the characters' lives against deceptively prosaic settings - a hospital cafeteria lit only by the lights in the snack machines, a half-built house "like a rib cage around a lungful of sky" - and the results linger long in the memory. In "Nipple of Paradise," Moore jumps back and forth in time between the birth of a child and a mother's unraveling marriage. "Wisdom Teeth" uses short, startling vignettes to weave together the story of a young woman. With lovingly constructed sentences and lush prose, Moore shows readers that love, alongside desire, can sometimes come softly, and sometimes as an ambush.

Genres: Short Stories, Canada, Fiction

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Lisa Moore has written two collections of stories, Degrees of Nakedness and Open, as well as a novel, Alligator.

Open and Alligator were both nominated for the Giller Prize. Alligator won the Commonwealth Prize for the Canadian Caribbean Region and the ReLit Award, and Open won the Canadian Authors' Association Jubilee Prize for Short Fiction.

Lisa has also written for television, radio, magazines (EnRoute, The Walrus and Chatelaine) and newspapers (The Globe and Mail and The National Post).

Lisa has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She also studied at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where she became a member of The Burning Rock Collective, a group of St. John's writers.

Reviews

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lisa Moore speaks my language, and in Degrees of Nakedness, her first short story collection from 2005, she speaks this language straight into the soul of me. I must confess that I don't always understand what Moore is talking about – she feints and flips and makes strange leaps – but on every page there is a turn of phrase or moment of truth that makes a reader want to pump her fist and stab the page and yammer to anyone nearby, “Yes. Like that.”

These are stories about love and sex, with recurring themes about cheating and parenting stepchildren, fires and German tourists, people coughing “like cotton ripping”. I may not have acted out the exact following scene, but it completely captures the strange impulsiveness that I was prone to as an eighteen-year-old:

I just talked and shouted and did cartwheels and the cancan with my parka open. I did chorus kicks all the way down the empty highway. I shrieked the lyrics from old musicals; I got plenty of nothin' and nothin's plenty for me. The hills climbed up on either side of us. Rain fell off the massive sky like the faces of buildings in an earthquake.

Many of the stories are constructed like impressionist collages; a movie reel spliced and taped back together seemingly at random; creating in large what this passage suggests writ small:

Sounds, smells, images, every sensation slipping over the next, chaotic, ticklish. I can feel the metallic yelp of the mailbox lid at the tips of my teeth and I have to run my tongue over them. The smell of ink, like the smell of blood. A fingernail broken to the quick, rubbed against a cotton bed sheet. Then the smell of paint thinner.

And if that seems too out there, any reader might appreciate the imagery of the following:

There's a photograph of the house my parents built together when it was just a skeleton. Blond two-by-fours like a ribcage around a lungful of sky.

I'll read anything by Lisa Moore – and despair that I'm nearly at the end of her current body of writing – but like with any other works of art, I trust these stories will reveal more to me upon revisiting.

[Paula Dembeck · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories by a Newfoundland author whose work I enjoy. I still struggle with this literary format but I have enjoyed Moore’s novels so much that I decided to try this volume. It also has an intriguing title and an interesting cover which drew me in.

These stories all coalesce around a single theme: the difficult experience of love, loving and being loved. Moore sees love as a state which occurs in isolated flashes, an experience we all crave but which also makes us vulnerable. She also believes love is a skill that is learned and difficult to master. Like any skill, the act of learning has its highs and lows, times when things go well and times of utter frustration. Moore’s stories also show how part of the experience of love is the deep longing that accompanies it.

The stories include all kinds of different love experienced by individuals and families most of whom live in Moore’s home province. They include desperate love, jealous love, parental love, destructive love, parental love and same sex love. The people in her stories are not especially remarkable, nor are her settings. She uses common backdrops such as a hospital cafeteria, a half built house and a one traffic town against which her characters live their somewhat ordinary, everyday lives. They show how love can be painful and have unintended consequences as well as erotic thrills. Her prose reminds readers that simple human connection is one of life’s special gifts, it is what we seek and continually search for, it is what brings people closer together and inspires a sense of connectivity and community.

Moore’s prose in these stories, like her novels, can be powerful. She has the ability to locate intense moments within a single phrase, filling a single dramatic moment with meaning and significance. In the first story "Nipple of Paradise" which opens the collection, a young mother hears about her husband Cy's infidelity as she listens to the monitor in her new baby’s nursery. Later, when she asks Cy how she knows he will not leave her, he responds by saying “You don’t – I love you fiercely right now and that’s the best I can offer you”. Moore's description of those two moments shows how she can communicate an intense moment of reality with just a few words, one seen through the eyes of her character Donna. In the scene that ends the story, Moore describes Donna as she sits out on her fire escape afterwards, thinking about Cy’s infidelity and what it means. Moore describes how a spider crawls over her foot, how her toes tensed, each toe stretching away from the others and how she could feel the spider make its web, lacing her toes together. It struck her that she had never experienced anything so sharply before. That description with those intricate details intensifies the moment for her readers.

The characters in Moore’s stories often feel alone even when they are with others. A woman stands with her crying child at a grocery store at four in the morning, a girl precariously hovers over a high diving board while her coach watches her from below and a taxidermist eats his meal alone in a restaurant with only the waitress as company, a young woman watching TV and listening with her earphones.

Moore’s characters know that loving exposes them to pain and risk, but they go ahead anyway, understanding and accepting that these intense attachments are fragile. Yet they still long for the experience, knowing the fact they are somehow attached to others is a sign they are human and engaged in life. During tough times people reach out to one another to connect and share their losses. Moore shows through her stories how this ultimately helps to build a community in a province that has long suffered from economic downturns.

For the most part, Moore writes in the present tense, but she sometimes jumps unexpectedly across time making strange leaps. Readers, tied to her story may feel disorientated and unsure where she is headed, but follow her anyway, not certain they understand.

Moore does not shy away from the sexual or the erotic, including in “Granular” the potential for the lowly cucumber. Her titles are quirky and funny and pull the reader to her stories, curious about where Moore will take them.

This collection shows Moore’s gift with prose, but I enjoy her novels much more. That is not to say that these stories are lacking, it just once again shows my inability to appreciate all the nuances of this format, which often leaves me wanting more.

[Vikki VanSickle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me by reader and writer extraordinnaire Grace O'Connell, who calls Lisa Moore one of the greatest living Canadian writers. Ms. O'Connell knows a thing or two about short fiction (having taught classes and having her own stories nominated for awards) and she was spot on with this collection.

This series of short, visceral, and impactful stories will stay with me for a long time. Most of them take place in and around Newfoundland and feature broken, memorable characters. Moore's attention to detail sets her apart from other writers, something I learned while reading (and falling in love with) her fabulous novel FEBRUARY (underrated and under-appreciated in my opinion.)

Sometimes you need a break from tried and true formula and narrative and DEGREES OF NAKEDNESS was a refreshing dip into literary fiction that reminded me of why I love words so much, especially when in the hands of a premiere wordsmith.

[Hanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a peculiar collection of short-stories. Gorgeously written, though not straight forward, but I think I stumbled on a decoding clue that Lisa Moore hid in the very last story.

“I read,’ the haiku is like a finger pointing at the moon. It’s important that it’s not a bejewelled or perfect finger. It only points to something.’”

The description of that haiku sounded like how she wanted her stories to sound. These stories aren’t about the moon. It never is about perfect people doing a set of perfect things. It is about the pointing, the writing itself, the journey while reading, rather than the end point.


Lisa Moore uses language like the painting grandmasters used their colours: there are some sentences you just want to capture and re-read a few times because the flow of the words, and the stunning image behind those sentences. Like ‘Houses digging their heels into the hill to stop from tumbling into the harbour’.

She also takes metaphors and parallels to a whole new level. In 'The Lonely Goatherd', Carl makes Styrofoam theatre sets for Red Riding Hood. Sarah, his assistant is ‘sweating over the giant chunk of Styrofoam from which the Wolf will be carved’, a wolf that is described as having saliva drooling form his fangs.
We know that Carl lately has been sleeping with other woman than his wife. And after using some kind of (illegal!) glue, Carl and Sarah’s hands are accidentally glued together, and only get separated 15 minutes after. ‘Carl stays a long time in the empty warehouse, his burnt hands cradled between his knees.’

In 'Sea Urchin' the main character remembers how her father once stepped on a sea urchin and how they had to pour melted wax on his foot to draw the needles out. She will pour metaphorical waxes on her own pain later in the story. But there's more: Her father died of a heart attack, while the nurse is explaining it to her, she notes “But a heart, in fact, must be like tissue paper, must come apart when it’s not pumping, must dissolve.” Later on a baby shower, the pregnant teacher opens a present. “She held it up, tissue paper over the side of the box.”
Or, how our heart is always on display. Even when we think we’re covering it up, that we’ve got it nicely boxed away, there’s always some tissue paper spilling out.

In 'Degrees of nakedness' ‘The top half of Joan’s house burned down while she slept downstairs’, just two or three nights after her last boyfriend leaves her. The fire is literal, but how much other damage is being done in the top half of Joan’s head after that happens?

'Wisdom teeth' tells the story of a woman, who as a child vouched to never get married and instead be a single mother, following her husband to an unknown city, away from her family, and remarks that she’s ‘in a lot of pain because her wisdom teeth are growing’.

In 'Nipples of Paradise', a young mother expected some kind of epiphany after the birth of her first child. Instead, a few days later she finds out through the baby monitor that her partner Cy slept with a friend who during a previous party in their house extinguished a fire in the kitchen. One fire might be gone, but she just dropped a small bomb. The young mother goes out and sits on a fire escape (of all places!) to ponder what she’s just heard and remembers a time when Cy’s thumb dipped into golden pigment was ‘glowing in the dark, like something precious, timeless’.


I think Lisa Moore wrote a glowing, precious collection of short stories, that you have to read slowly to really enjoy and strip it down layer by layer. Upon my first read I gave this 4 stars, but I have a feeling stars will be added with every re-read.

[Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

„Vielleicht ein Jahrestag oder der Zeitpunkt eines einzelnen Ficks“.
 
Lisa Moore ist eine der großen kanadischen Schriftstellerinnen. Sie steht in der Tradition von Alice Munro, John Updike und Richard Ford, schreibt schöne, schmerzvoll wirklichkeitsnahe Erzählungen. Bekannt scheint sie hier bisher nicht zu sein, obwohl der Band „Fremde Hochzeit“ mit elf ausgewählten Erzählungen von 1995 bis 2018 ihr viertes ins Deutsche übersetze Buch ist. Höchste Zeit, vor allem ihren Erzählstil zu entdecken! Denn sie schreibt anschaulich, sinnlich und komplex von „hormonellen Metamorphosen“ im bürgerlichen Milieu. Romantik? Na ja, eher nicht:
 
Eleanor schaut ihrem Ehemann Philip auf der Hochzeit einer Freundin beim Flirten mit einer Blondine zu. Muss sie das dulden, weil sie eine offene Beziehung führen? Wie offen eigentlich?
 
Es stimmt, was alle zu Donna sagen: Man kann sich keinen liebevolleren Vater als Cy vorstellen. Trotzdem schläft er nach der Geburt des Kindes einmal mit einer anderen Frau.
 
Ein gereifter Mann sieht die Frau, in die er dieses eine Mal im Leben so richtig verliebt war, aber mit der eine Beziehung nie etwas geworden ist oder wäre, nach 35 Jahren wieder, in der Ausnahmesituation eines starken Schneesturms.
 
Du sitzt beim Friseur, lässt dir die Haare von der glücklichen Single-Stylistin färben und kurzschneiden. In dir grollt die zurückliegende Scheidung. Du fühlst dich allein.
 
Eine andere Frau trauert, denkt delirierend an ihren toten Mann, während ihre Partybekanntschaft, Zahnarzt, halbtrunken ihren schmerzenden Zahn zieht und ihr anschließend einen Antrag macht.
 
Moore rafft Episoden aus den Lebensläufen ihrer Figuren zu dichten Erzählungen zusammen, setzt die Bruchstücke zu „Collagen von Erinnerungen“ und Bewusstseinsströmen mit der Situation zusammen, die die Erinnerungen plötzlich ausgelöst hat: „Ich musste daran denken, dass die Liebe aus vereinzelten Augenblicken besteht und dass sie es sind, die wir ersehnen.“ Alle Figuren, die in der Mehrheit Frauen sind, erleben wir beim zweifelhaften und verzweifelten Lieben, in überschäumenden Geschichten vom flüchtigen, aber augenblicklich immer intensiven und ebenso egoistischen Begehren.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

The next few books I have dug out of my shelves are inspired by a recent family reunion in Newfoundland. I discovered Newfoundland literature more than a decade ago, introduced to it by a couple of Newfoundland friends. I found, and continue to find, it alluring because of its mythic, magical real ethos. I have read the work of Michael Crummey, Wayne Johnston, Lisa Moore, Jessica Grant, Joan Clark, Donna Morrissey, Michael Winter, Andy Jones, Bernice Morgan, and others. "Degrees of Nakedness" is a short story collection. Lisa Moore is a member of The Burning Rock Collective of writers that formed in the mid 1990s in St. John’s. Unlike a writer like Michael Crummey, who explores the mythic dimensions of Newfoundland history, Lisa Moore focuses on contemporary Newfoundland, mostly urban St. John’s.
The stories are narrated by protagonists who are young women, sexually active, sometime single but most often married with children and family, and the families are most often blended (second marriages, children from earlier marriages/relationships). The stories are primarily about–or narrated from the perspective of–a woman (single, married, pregnant, mother) navigating her world, the people who inhabit it, both in the present and the past. The stories are organized as the protagonist working through something or somethings, figuring out something or somethings (relationships, emotions, events, moments, places). Some of the stories in the volume are conventionally realistic, but more of them are grounded in poetic figures. In them, Moore uses metaphor, simile, and symbol as means of character and plot development. For the reader, for me, that means reading more slowly for the network of figural signifiers she creates rather than reading for a linear plot line. In these stories, Moore uses figural signifiers to produce an interpretive frame which makes sense of the realistic linear plot elements. Thus, the realistic elements of the story are part of a more complex paradigmatic whole. Once I figured out the relationship between the poetic and realistic in Moore’s stories, they were easier to navigate.
A few examples of stories that are particularly well-realized:
“Nipples of Paradise” is about the protagonist’s experiences during pregnancy, birth, and afterwards. The narrator describes fragmented images and moments in time that are beginning to fade from her memory. A clear temporal sequence of events is also fading. She would ground this melange of experience by focusing on particular moments (sex, birth) and meta-level guiding interpretive claims. In “Sea Urchin,” the narrator uses the incident when her father stepped on a sea urchin while on vacation in Barbados to center a story about death (father, uncle) and love (mother, partner). The sea urchin represents injury, pain, and cure, a cycle/resolution which does not coincide with the protagonist’s experience of the family; thus, the sea urchin does not offer a sense of solution or consolation but reinforces the protagonist’s sense that love, life, and death are incomprehensible. The story “The Degrees of Nakedness” uses nakedness ironically as a layering metaphors. There is the house guest who can barely stay dressed; the narrator wants to be photographed nude at places around St. John’s; the naked emotions of the woman who is being harassed by her lover; a trip to a strip club; the emotions the narrator feels about her husband leaving for a job far away. Nakedness becomes a thick figural cover for all that the narrator is experiencing. “Surge” is more realistic than poetic. In it, Moore references the first line of "Anna Karenina"–“Each family is unhappy after its own fashion”--to provide the story’s thesis. The family: husband and wife, husband’s daughter from a prior relationship, wife’s son by a previous relationship, and a daughter of this husband and wife. The husband’s daughter splits time between her parents and is a distinctly unhappy teenager, because her mother does not seem to care enough for her. The narrator’s son brings home a friend who is not living at home with his parents. This is a story of splintered people and families which cohere just enough around the mother’s point of view. She is perceptive, caring and concerned, and she effectively manages the others’ emotions, mostly the step-daughter and son, but also the son’s friend. Throughout "Degrees of Nakedness," Moore creates home as a liberal, accepting space where the tensions and divisions of the characters’ lives find relief. When home is menaced, as it is by fire in the final story, “Haloes,” the sense of danger increases, because the safe space where the narrator works to create a liberal, accepting space is threatened. As much as these stories are about the characters and their interactions, they are also about geography and space. For Moore, home is a multidimensional space where different people and circumstances can co-exist and not collide, at least not much, with the help of the narrator who actively manages the others’ lives to create a subtle, liberal, and coherent space.
It strikes me, reading this book in 2023, that it is steeped in conventional heterosexuality. There are many explicit descriptions of sex between a man and woman. Sex is clearly a powerful motive force that makes, breaks, and recalibrates relationships, something that is simply accepted in the larger social milieu of these stories. But LGTBQ+ lives are missing here, so there is a limit to the kind of liberal family spaces Moore creates.

[Carolina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I totally have a girl-crush on this woman. I love her eye for detail, her sense of language, the things she bothers to mention on paper, the pace of her prose. I always feel grabbed and hauled along. Willingly, yes, but with something flapping. Coattails, perhaps.

[Karyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is lyrically beautiful.

[Orla Hegarty · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am really not a fan of her writing although I loved one of her books. The library sent this to me, unrequested. I guess it had value in terms of understanding local writing culture. None of the stories seemed to have a point except some soft porn aspects that had only shock value.

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like poetry than fiction.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rather eclectic collection of stories, alternating between some sweet satire and some surprisingly in-your-face bluntness. Of all the things I took away from this book, I certainly didn't expect one of them would be a rather appalled feeling regarding cucumbers...but such are the surprises found in literature.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I read Lisa Moore's books I know what it is to be other people. She is that good. And after reading a series of disappointing books, Degrees of Nakedness was like wrapping myself into a blanket against the cold of winter.

[Melissa T · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think I read this paying as much attention to it as I should have. It's a collection of short stories, but honestly I didn't think any of them made much sense at all. This was interesting at least, and I want to read another book by this author to see if I like it.

[Pablito Canada · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy and enjoyable read. I guess this is what female sexuality is like, but don't really know as I have the other equipment. My wife, on the other hand, did not like the stories at all.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short story collection of life in Newfoundland. Fascinating.

[Gor-ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book of short stories about relationships and sex. I find Lisa Moore to be very skillful of capturing the setting of the east coast of Canada.

[Lynne Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Screw Margaret Atwood! THIS is great Canadian writing!

[Jennifer Farquhar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection of short stories. The characters were interesting, and I loved the Maritime flavour. I look forward to reading her second collection of stories, Open.

[Karen · Rating 1 out of 5]

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