Lorrie Moore: America's first lady of darkness and mirth

"Time," says Lorrie Moore. "It's always been a struggle for time. Look." She points across the room, past piles of her teenage son's sports gear. "There's my Christmas tree." A tiny Norfolk spruce sits in a pot on the windowsill, oppressed with some outsize tinselly stars. "I didn't have time to get a real tree – though of course it is a real tree – or even to take down the tree I actually got. It's always been a struggle for time, though I do feel as I get older that more time is opening up. I mean, my son is now away at [boarding] school." In theory, she's alone – there's no one else in her life – and, in theory, she should have all the time in the world.

We're sitting in the shadowy, pleasantly cluttered living room of her college professor's house in Madison, Wisconsin, on the day the Orange prize has longlisted A Gate at the Stairs. This bleak, edgy portrait of a young American woman's encounter with a midwestern family and their adopted daughter is Moore's state-of-the-nation novel, leavened with the quirky observations and trademark black humour her readers have come to love.

America is gearing up for war. In the desperate search for meaning in everyday life after 9/11, there's a dislocated vulnerability. "My room-mate Murph," says Tassie, the narrator, "had met her boyfriend on September tenth, and when she woke up at his place, she'd phoned me in horror and happiness, the television blaring. 'I know, I know', she said, her voice shrugging into the phone. 'It was a terrible price to pay for love, but it had to be done.'"

A Gate at the Stairs is not the book Moore's fans expected. The American response was a mixture of adulation and bafflement. Still, it was a bestseller, a departure that signalled a new mood in the heart of its author, a mood possibly sponsored by the nightmare of the Bush years, Moore's protracted battle with the typescript ("it took 10 years to write, working on it off and on"), and her inevitable progress into middle age.

Typically, she makes light of being 53. "What does that mean ? When I was 52 I used to say, at long last, I have a full deck. Now I say we're into the joker years. I mean, every deck must have two jokers..." Professor Moore (she teaches creative writing) can laugh about "my first joker year" but – as in her short stories – there's an undertow of melancholy. "Actually, it's not funny, or wild, but we'll see. It's only March." In the next breath, comparing her 40s to her 50s, Moore, who was divorced in 2001, remarks, "at 53, you think I've had my marriage, my fun. I'm moving towards the solitaire years, the nursing home..." Her conversational arpeggios of gravity and mirth are delivered with such a sparkle that you know she's only half serious. But which half?

That's always the question with Lorrie Moore. Her two short novels (Anagrams, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital ?) and her three story collections (Self-Help, Like Life, Birds of America) secured her a reputation for brevity and wit, the laughter of funerals and the tragicomedies of love – women in love with the wrong men, girls at odds with their mothers. Dave Eggers observes that while she is "fascinated almost exclusively with broken people, she is among the funniest writers alive": a common refrain. Some critics find themselves only just on the right side of idolatry, placing her work squarely in the antechamber of contemporary greatness. Alison Lurie has said that she's "the nearest thing we have to Chekhov".

Now that "the joker years" have arrived, there's also the inevitable middle-aged calculation of the books that might be left. "I always feel that the book I'm working on is my last book", she answers, half-seriously again, "and that I don't have another book in me. Mind you, I've felt like that about the last two or three. Plus" – more merriment – "I've just signed a two-book contract with Knopf!" A stage whisper. "So don''t tell them. Whatever! There's always another book..." She says that she'd "love to do more novels", but right now is writing stories. This will not disappoint Helen Simpson, who says that "Lorrie Moore's stories pack more wit and tragicomic power into a single paragraph than most novels manage over 15 chapters."

But it's not just the passage of time that's the problem, says Moore. "What we should worry about is the will. You have got to believe in the project, the book itself. You have to find the will, and then the energy will follow." She describes her quest for the narrative heart of A Gate at the Stairs. "It was to do with the character (Tassie Keltjin) and the voice, of a 20-year-old girl alone in the midwest, having a series of misadventures, a character like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. It was not one of those novels where the events come from some fatal flaw within the protagonist, it's a novel that's more like Alice in Wonderland."

As she says this, I cannot suppress the thought that the mock-serious woman with the long, dark, girlish hair sitting in front of me in this quasi-Victorian living room might be just a little bit like Carroll's Alice herself. She's a writer highly attuned to the quiddities of language – "when you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet" – delighting in puns, capable of sharp, brilliant insights, cutting asides, wild fantasy. And she is a wicked observer, a woman who relishes the cracks in mundane reality through which all kinds of bizarre madness can flourish.

When you read Lorrie Moore you find reality ever so slightly skewed, and more than slightly heightened, in a semi-dystopian wonderland. She herself says that she relishes those moments when the even flow of time gets snapped by a sudden crisis and "something's broken". She says her stories begin "with an injury. Then the story becomes like the bandage round a wound." Critics respond to this apprehension of pain behind the laughter. "Sublimely dark," in the words of the New York Times.

Moore arrives at this position from a childhood she describes, choosing her words with care, as "not unhappy". She was born in 1957, the second of four children, to professional middle-class parents, and spent her early life in upstate New York, the town of Glens Falls. She was christened Lorrie, a conflation of Marie and Lorena, two grandmothers' names. Her mother was a nurse who cherished her four children's artistic lives and dabbled in am-dram: it was the 60s. "There was acting, and dressing up," Moore remembers. "We'd play music, and write crappy songs. We'd draw and paint, and fancy ourselves as artistic. It was part of being a girl in the 60s that you were creative."

She took dance classes, and made up stories. Her father worked in insurance, having abandoned youthful ambitions to be a writer. "All my family were writers," says Moore, tallying up her father (stories), grandfather (unpublished novel), great uncle (poetry). But they were not Yankees; they came from the south where, a long time ago, they'd owned plantations. "My sister claims we are descended from the Temples of Stowe, who trace their family to... Lady Godiva!"

Moore's first success as a writer came 19, winning a short story prize from the magazine Seventeen. Typically, she attributes her vocation to disappointment: her exclusion from the St Lawrence College choir. "That's what I really wanted," she sighs, "to be in the choir, but I didn't have a good enough voice. I had to face facts: I wasn't going to be part of this choir, so I began to write seriously." I mutter something about the choir's loss and fiction's gain. "Oh I don't know that it was either," she replies cheerfully. "Let's not examine that too closely. It might have been the choir's gain and literature's loss."

After St Lawrence, so proximate to the Canadian border that it flies the maple leaf alongside the stars and stripes, she worked as a paralegal in New York City. Her job was to shrink thousands of pages of deposition to a simple precis. "I got rid of all adjectives, adverbs, even verbs and prepositions. It was basically down to just nouns."

Then she did graduate work at Cornell and wrote the stories that became her first collection, Self-Help, which was singled out for praise by the New York Times, but which she now considers to have "too many birds and moons, and space aliens, and struggling artists of every stripe, as well as much illness and divorce and other sad facts of family and romantic life".

Moore was instinctively drawn to the transistorised charge of the short story. "I'm probably not a natural novelist," she confesses, "but I want to become one. I loved working on A Gate at the Stairs. I know it's not perfect, but that's what novels are allowed to be – imperfect. I know it speeds up at the end – like a Toyota – it has a little floor-mat problem at the end. A short story has to have energy and focus, but novels can wander around quite a bit."

In the 1980s, Moore's energy and focus were directed to a succession of short stories. By the end of the decade she had made her reputation with a near perfect collection, Like Life, and the novella, Anagrams. The British critics were enthusiastic: her fans include Hilary Mantel, Nick Hornby, Julian Barnes and Roddy Doyle. Her family were more circumspect. Her mother's response was usually on the lines of, "Well, I read your story. I just felt so sorry for that woman..."

Then, at 27, she was offered her current creative-writing post at Madison, Wisconsin, one of the best midwestern campuses. She claims she had no idea how far west the town is – actually just a short flight from Chicago ("I hadn't studied the map") – but says "I needed the job". At first, the isolation left her in tears. An indulgent dean let her teach the fall semester, and then escape to New York City for eight months, a sublet in Hell's Kitchen on the lower East side. In 1998, as her career took off, she published Who Will Run The Frog Hospital?, a novel inspired by her childhood. She married Mark Borns, adopted a biracial son, Benjamin, got divorced acrimoniously, and has spent much of the last decade as a single mother.

It's tempting to read Moore's work as a surreal road map to the author's interior. A Gate at the Stairs is partly about Tassie's adventures as a nanny to a family adopting a little girl, Mary-Emma (Emmie). But that, she insists, would be wrong. Having adopted Benjamin, "I just got interested in that world. Of course you say to yourself, What if you wrote a novel that explored this world? But it's not about my life in any way. Was it prompted by things I witnessed and thought about? Sure. Actually, I put Tassie in situations that wouldn't logically occur – as a convenience to the author – as a narrative device."

Having described this process with an almost clinical detachment, Moore's sadness comes back. "The world of adoption is so fraught, and I've heard so many stories, sometimes I'd sit at my desk and think, What is the saddest thing that could happen? And my mind just goes there. I know it's a pretty bleak world. My editor, Vicky Wilson, at Knopf rang. [Moore slips into a strong New York accent] 'Well, doll. I think we've reached a whole new level of desolation here.'"

The desolation is the author's and for Moore the novel becomes a kind of haunting, analogous to a dream. "Novels borrow from the world like that," she goes on. "They are different from reportage or photographs. They take things, and scramble them and create a parallel universe that asks questions, without providing any answers."

When she talks about A Gate at the Stairs, she sounds wearied by its mood, but insists: "I would like to write more novels." After a pause, she adds: "Right now, I'm writing stories about money. I'm very interested in what people will do for money. Money: it's timeless."

That search for a timeless theme in her work is reinforced by her life as a single mother, her tenure with the creative writing programme, and also by the dazzling football career of her son, Benjamin Borns-Moore, the Wisconsin soccer star whose presence fills her house and her life. Moore is proud of her son, a member of the under-14s on the US national team, and has adapted well to her role as a soccer mom. "He's a midfielder," she explains with pride, "and a jock. Very excited about the world cup. He thinks it will be Brazil or Spain." The Moore family does not rate England's chances. "You know Beckham just tore his achilles tendon. That's a very bad injury."

What about Rooney ? "Oh, Rooney's the best. Ben thinks that England might be in the top four, but that's it. He knows the starting line up of every European team. We're reading this very interesting book about football together, you know. Soccernomics."

Raising Ben, coming to terms with her divorce (she used to refer to her ex as an "asshole", but now characterises him as a kind of "uncle" in her son's life), and running Madison's creative-writing programme have given Moore a sense of belonging. She concedes a certain scepticism about creative writing. "I have a friend," she says, "who says it's a pyramid scheme – but at least it's our pyramid scheme." She also evinces a distinct toughness about the necessary qualities of the professional writer. "My students," she says, "are so competent and sympathetic – and nice, because that's what the course requires. I'm not sure that niceness is what we should promote in writers."

"I've been in Madison a long time, about 26 years," she says, almost with surprise, but claims to feel fully assimilated. "Now I'd feel like a tourist in New York City, but..." She stops herself. "Everyone tells me that I'm not a midwesterner, and when I look sad, they say 'That's a compliment!' A college town is full of transients," she goes on. "It's like an army base."

Madison still has its provincial pride. "Some people have thought I was critical. If you write with an outsider's eye, that's fine. But after you do that, you have to move. You have to get out of town." Lorrie Moore is enjoying the tragicomedy of her middle-aged life. "That's the mistake I made. I didn't get out of town."

• Orange prize for fiction 2010
• The Observer
• Lorrie Moore
• Fiction
• Women's prize for fiction
• interviews

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