Anne Moore's Life

This short story about the life of Anne Moore practically turned it’s own pages.  I can barely fathom the life she led and experiences she had.   From the beginning, the author had us hooked with the story of Fred, the teenage boyfriend of Anne’s sister, Susan.  The revelation that Fred had killed both of his parents, and quite possibly thought about killing Susan and Anne after driving them over to his house, was the start to a series of shocking and disturbing events in Anne’s life.  The first serious relationship Anne was involved in was with Paul, a painter.  This may have been the beginning of her struggles, in my opinion, for their sporadic behavior seemed to spark even more from Anne as the story progressed.  They just up and decided to travel to Mexico where they met Ruben.  The Frog in Mazatlan that was “frequented by tourists” sounded very similar to the Senor Frogs in Nassau that we visited while on spring break during my senior year of high school.   Returning to Mexico with Paul a couple of years later, Anne found herself having an affair with Ruben, and staying with him in Mexico long after Paul had left.  At this point, Anne had a long succession of men come and go in her life.  From Charles, whose “fondest dream was to have a whore,” who pushed her into selling her body for money for one night, to Tony, whom she married and left only to find that he had killed himself soon after, I began to wonder how she carried on the way she did.  The author wrote, “One day Anne’s love for Tony ran out and she left Seattle.”  This was very interesting to me, since it seemed like her love for whichever partner she was with at the time eventually “ran out.”  While I know this happens all the time, I don’t believe that a person can really fall in and out of love quite as much as Anne did in this story.  I feel like she was just lonely, albeit independent, and used each of these men mentioned, and the other ones following until she was ready for the next one.  I also got the feeling that the narrator had cared deeply and fallen pretty hard for Anne, though it seemed that he was only another one of her victims.  Don’t get me wrong; I know she fought some pretty rough battles.  I assume the disease she developed was cancer, which would be terrifying, but it shouldn’t have made her run away from someone (Bill) who told her that “she could count on his support.”  Perhaps she was scared that she was running out of time and wanted to see the world by fleeing to Europe, but she seemed, in my eyes, to be a very selfish person, never once caring how her decisions might impact others.

Vocabulary Words

-Insufferable:  intolerable

-Imperceptibly: so subtle, slight, or gradual as to be barely perceptible 

-Barbiturates:  any of a class of sedative and sleep-inducing drugs derived from barbituric acid