I knew it was over only because, in a first, each time I pressed “NEXT PAGE” on my Kindle, the page didn’t flash—but seemingly stood still despite my commands to the contrary. A reticent teenager. The last page had been reached and like a cord snapped, then cut, I’ve been dropped to muddle through the droplets at the basin of Lorrie Moore’s words. More aptly, Tassie Keltjin’s words. It was Tassie, her 20-year-old Midwestern narrator, after all, whose wry sarcasm, so lively, became a kind of internal conversation, a banter between my present self and a someone so vaguely close we together reveled in a complicity of obsessive observation, of ideas so often lost.

It was a month-long conversation, but its’ roots plumb to something deeper, at least something younger within me. I have run out chances to run to A Gate at the Stairs, to Tassie, as some fountain of wisdom, of farmer’s daughter’s wit. After a while, after her obsessive ticks and wordplays nestled in your brain you can convince yourself that this dialogue you’re having has a vitality—that whatever philosophical meaning you find in its’ approach to yesterday is but the basis for an ongoing narrative about today.

For 320+ pages evoking my times (as I remember them all, mostly good) in Wisconsin, Lorrie Moore manages to vividly recreate the prairies and the college town without ever using the words “Madison” or “Wisconsin”. In that respect, she has left her fictitious place settings to live on without compromise in my brain.

And then the book ends.

I have been reading A Gate at the Stairs with my mother. That is to say, quickly after breaking in to the book myself, I saw an opportunity in Moore’s wit and unpretentious narrative to rekindle a dialogue between my mother and myself. Always close, but we had been closer, I wondered if the rambles of a 20-year-old could some how spark meaningful discourse. I recommended she pick up a copy and she quickly did. We didn’t talk much through the process and I’m not we needed to. Through Tassie and our shared memories of Madison, Mukwonago, and Milwaukee, we were in fact elevating our conversation well beyond the weather. Or the sale at the Gap. It began a project we will inevitably continue now, reading a book together, stunning each other with what we catch, what we miss. The narrative between us offers a shared experience but also an experimental one, where we learn more in our reactions, in our approach to these plot twists than merely providing a way to pass the time. On the contrary, we may have found a way to stop time. At least for a moment.