You're Ugly, Too

You're Ugly, Too written by Lorrie Moore describes a lot about the people of today and yesterday. It does this through a lot of different descriptions. The descriptions of the main character, Zoe, and the students that she is surrounded by says a lot about the growth and change in our culture from one generation to another. The time that the author spends describing the continual dismissive attitude and inability to make decisions and stick with them by Zoe says more about the generations before mine. But most interesting to myself was the time spent allowing the jokes to have meaning in the lives of the characters present at the party. The generation divide was obvious by the characters being both spread out and dressed so extremely differently. I wish that the jokes meant more to me and could help me understand more about what the characters were going through at the time, but I think that sometimes generation divides make our thought process and comprehension different on all levels. What I think that these jokes could have meant might be entirely different than what they really do. What made me really wonder was the reaction that Zoe had to the interruption or maybe the joke itself that Earl told. I couldn't really figure out which it was. "There was accusation in her voice," was what really made me contemplate the reaction that was being presented to the reader. What was her actual problem with the joke? I wish that I could understand if it was Earl, the scenario, the joke, or simply whatever was going on in the mind of Zoe.

What really impressed me in this story was the clutch use of vulgar vocabulary. That really made the jokes a lot funnier.