Profiled in the SMH around her obsessive behaviour that leads to writing.

Moore often says in interviews that her real life is too boring to talk about. She grew up in Glen Falls, a small town in upstate New York, and after graduating from St Lawrence University, lived for a couple of years in Manhattan before moving west. For the past 25 years she has lived in Madison, Wisconsin, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and suffers bouts of claustrophobia and the occasional backlash that comes from being a well-known writer in a relatively small community. When she first moved there, she says, she felt so overwhelmed by professorial life that she tried to cultivate a flameproof persona. “I had such a reaction to the academic culture that I used to ask myself, ‘What would Goldie Hawn do?’ Because I thought she was completely unflappable.” But she says there is also a lot to like about the place, not least the breathing space that it has allowed for her writing.

When she was growing up, Moore wrote stories about “crazy magical things – things flying off into space to different planets and stuff”. Her teachers seemed to like them, though she says: “I don’t know that they were any good.” Her father worked in insurance and her mother trained as a nurse. They were both creative, which, perversely, made them less enthusiastic about their daughter’s preferred career path; creativity was something you did in your spare time. Moore has vivid memories of being taken as a child to watch rehearsals of the Glen Falls Operetta Club, in which both parents were involved. “They both had a lot of artistic and intellectual impulses in their lives. But in the end they just became classic middle-class parents, you know – you’ve gotta get a job, you’ve gotta work.”

Tell me about it, sistah.