It’s the birthday of author Maria Lorena Moore, better known as Lorrie Moore, born in 1957 in Glen Falls, NY. While her literary output has been relatively modest, her short stories and novels can be at once devastatingly funny and moving.

At 19 Moore won a fiction contest at Seventeen magazine, resulting in her first published short story (“Raspberries,” 1977). She studied English at St. Lawrence University (Canton, NY) and eventually got her MFA at Cornell University, where she wrote most of the stories included in her first published collection, Self-Help (1985). A later collection, Birds of America (1998), became a New York Times bestseller. In addition to several short story collections, she has published three novels: Anagrams (1986), Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), and A Gate at the Stairs (2009).

If you’ve never read anything by Moore, you could do worse than to start with the short story “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” which won the O. Henry Award in 1998 and was included in The Best American Short Stories 1998. In the story, we meet the Mother, the Baby, and the Husband, as they deal with the Baby’s diagnosis with cancer. In one early scene, the Baby plays with the light switch while the Mother listens to the Surgeon describe the tumor and the treatment that is necessary:

“We will start with a radical nephrectomy,” says the Surgeon, instantly thrown into darkness again. His voice comes from nowhere and everywhere at once. “And then we’ll begin with chemotherapy after that. These tumors usually respond very well to chemo.”

“I’ve never heard of a baby having chemo,” the Mother says. Baby and Chemo, she thinks: they should never even appear in the same sentence together, let alone the same life. In her other life, her life before this day, she was a believer in alternative medicine. Chemo-therapy? Unthinkable. Now, suddenly, alternative medicine seems the wacko maiden aunt to the Nice Big Daddy of Conventional Treatment. How quickly the old girl faints and gives way, leaves one just standing there. Chemo? Of course: chemo! Why, by all means: chemo. Absolutely! Chemo!

In the Contributors’ Notes at the back of Best American Short Stories, Moore wrote: “This story has a relationship to real life like that of a coin to a head. It is dedicated to my son.” (Her son is probably about twenty-three years old now; she told The Guardian in a 2008 interview when he was 13 that he was both very good at sports and had somewhat delicate health.)

Moore taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 30 years before joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 2013, where she is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English.

Have a lovely Saturday—it is snow-filled here today—and stay scrupulously honest to the data.