You Re Ugly Too Summary

Hope Gernert

September 23rd, 2016

English 205

Professor Belletto

Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too” introduces the reader to Zoë Hendricks, a character who at first glance seems carefree and convivial, as she is known to offer her college students hot chocolate and often sings to them in class. After reading further it becomes clear that Zoë’s raw sarcasm and joking manner are in fact a defense mechanism and her only way of dealing with the situations she is presented with, ones ranging from her love life (or lack thereof) to her home life and sense of self. Zoë is restless and finds happiness and contentment to be beyond reach. Her sarcasm paired with these piled on insecurities ultimately leave her alienated from her relationships, from

love, and from herself. In this way, Moore suggests that it does not matter where you are in life, whether it be physically or emotionally, it only matters what you are and how you respond to such situations.
The setting is ostensibly one of the principal elements of this story, and it is organized into two distinct parts: The Midwest and New York City. The opening sentence begins “You had to get out of them occasionally, those Illinois towns…” (Moore 67). Already, there is a sense of unease. The narrator goes on to describe Zoë’s feelings toward her students at Hilldale-Versailles College, an incongruously named school on the outskirts of the incongruously named town of Paris, Illinois. “[They] were by and large good Midwesterners, spacey with estrogen from large quantities of meat and cheese. They shared their parents’ suburban values; their parents had given them things, things, things. They were complacent. They had been purchased” (Moore 69). The language used here, such as spacey, complacent and purchased, are all negatively connoted adjectives to describe the Illinois people, building on Zoë’s adverse attitude toward her physical location. Prior to Hilldale-Versailles, she taught in Minnesota, “Land of the Dying Shopping Mall [where] everyone was so blond…that brunettes were often presumed to be from foreign countries” (Moore 69). She makes this lack of diversity abundantly clear and claims the Midwest is making her “brittle and pointed” (Moore 70).
About halfway through the narrative, Zoë leaves Illinois to visit her sister in New York for Halloween weekend. The reader expects a hopeful turn of events; a weekend trip to the Big Apple will surely lighten Zoë’s mood. However, it quickly becomes apparent that Zoë brings herself with her wherever she goes. She promptly adopts a skeptical view of the city, noting “It seemed a little unnatural to live up in the sky like this, like birds that out of some wrongheaded derring-do had nested too high” (Moore 78). And when the city is put in a positive light, it is established that “people were saying the usual things: how it looked like jewels, like bracelets and necklaces unstrung” (Moore 82). People were saying this, but not Zoë. She never agrees.
Threaded throughout these scenes is Zoë’s sarcasm. Her response to every situation is to be sarcastic, whether it be in the form of a defense mechanism or simply a reaction. She loves to joke and her sense of humor is large, but her jokes are often lost on her audience, alienating her from her peers. On a first date (a double date, to specify), the other woman brags about her great memory and her ability to name every person at a dinner party. Zoë, who was well aware of this married woman’s flirting with Zoë’s own date, countered with “‘I knew a dog who could do that’” (Moore 73). Moore goes on to say “Murray and the wife looked at her with vexed and rebuking expressions...Zoë swallowed” (73). Here, it is evident how Zoë’s sarcastic manner tends to isolate her from her relationships.
And later when Zoë’s younger, trendier, food designer Manhattanite sister Evan discusses the possibility of marriage to her successful boyfriend of five years, Zoë tells her that she’s too young. Evan states “‘You’re only saying that because you’re five years older than I am and you’re not married’” (Moore 71). Zoë retaliates with “‘I’m not married? Oh, my God...I forgot to get married’” (71). This, among other witty comebacks of hers, shows the reader how rather than face her problems head on, in this case her lack of romantic relationship, Zoë dodges these conversations by quickly dismissing them with sarcastic comments. It is her ultimate defense mechanism, and while it works in avoidance, it is destructive in that it widens the disconnect between herself and her emotions.
Once Moore fully enforces this idea that Zoë is languishing in the Midwest and chooses to enlist in sarcasm to protect herself from and avoid her deep-seated loneliness, she establishes the character’s desire for escape.

Zoë is obsessed with finding ties to the outside world, depicted through her relationships with her mailman, her cab driver, her sister, and late night TV. “Zoë lived for the mail, for the postman...when she got a real letter, with a real full-price stamp, from someplace else, she took it to bed with her and read it over and over” (Moore 70). At Christmas, she tips two people and two people only: this mailman and Jerry, the cab driver who drives her to the airport when she makes her frequent trips to New York. It is intriguing that both of these people represent a link to the world beyond Paris, Illinois. Zoë describes the letters as being “real,” as if in contrast to her actual life in the Midwest, which she is never happy with. And Jerry the cabbie is her only friend, one of the few people or things Zoë ever talks about in a positive way, giving him the nickname Jare. The third and perhaps final person Zoe likes is her sister, 1,000 miles away in the faraway land of New York City, so opposite from her Midwestern suburb in Illinois. Lastly, “She also watch[es] television until all hours,” (Moore 71) which is a universally known form of escape. It is clear that confinement and escape are underlying themes throughout the

text.
Perhaps one reason Zoë is so sarcastic is because she is truly adrift in life, with insecurities that are deeply rooted within her.

Perhaps one reason Zoë is so sarcastic is because she is truly adrift in life, with insecurities that are deeply rooted within her.
Bothered by the mirror
Heidi as the perfect girl, which she is not
Carries all her things in Baggies “is this who i’ve become? A single woman at the movies with her baggies?”