I first encountered Lorrie Moore when I read “How to Become a Writer,” a mesmerizingly bleak story from her 1985 debut collection, Self-Help, which I imagine to be so frequently anthologized because editors want something of hers and because the title is so appealing. Besides, it’s a promising one, suggesting a clear set of instructions. Like much of Self-Help, the story is voiced in second-person imperative, but it can only offer directions down a road to nowhere: “First,” its opening lines instruct, “try to be something, anything, else.”

SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE: ESSAYS, CRITICISM, AND COMMENTARY by Lorrie Moore Knopf, 432 pp., $29.95

Did Lorrie Moore ever try to be anything else? Her collected nonfiction, in the newly-released See What Can Be Done, offers a few answers: some about Moore herself, and some about the intertwined joys and despairs of a writing life—and the futility, perhaps, of resisting one. As in her fiction—for which the vast majority of readers know her—Moore’s one-liners are tart, but never acid. “The clichés here,” she writes of James Cameron’s Titanic, “are sturdy to the point of eloquence.” Of George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election: “He was too proud to flirt.” She strikes the reader as someone who could silence a room with a few well-placed glances; the most withering thing she will say about the most ridiculous of passages is that it “gives one pause.” I was three-quarters of the way through this book before I realized—shocked, and then shocked at my shock—that it contains no hatchet jobs.

See What Can Be Done is mostly cultural criticism: a scabbard sheathing 34 years’ worth of American media, from Nora Ephron’s Heartburn to the 2016 election, but studded, here and there, with gem-dense personal essay. The most unsettling of all these is “One Hot Summer, or A Brief History of Time,” Moore’s essay on her own honeymoon, folded into a book that contains occasional tossed-over-the-shoulder references to male partners who alternately support and undermine women’s creative work. (Edna St. Vincent Millay, we learn, was married to “the stunning Eugen Boissevain,” who cooked her dinners and tried morphine to better understand his wife’s addiction and withdrawal.)

We learn, in the piece, that Moore is looking back on a marriage that has already ended, and the essay is dense with images that would seem at home in one of Moore’s fictions: at her courthouse wedding, she recalls, “a sweet little orchid was placed into my hand by someone.” There is something vertiginously thrilling about watching a storyteller snatch, from her own life, the telling details that usually cluster around a character who has no idea she is in a story at all. But perhaps the desire for story is what gets us into trouble to begin with. About her and her once-future-now-former husband’s decision to marry, Moore writes: “We are all fiends for narrative, plot, rising action… Perhaps we were a little bored. Something, we both seemed to agree, should probably occur.”

Learning is frightening, and writing is pain. None of this, Moore’s writing suggests, means one should avoid such a life.

Perhaps there is no story—and perhaps this is the point. “How to Become a Writer” begins with the urge to write and ends in the desert to which such a desire may deliver the writer—not once, as ending or punishment, but daily, as a kind of side trip, between sentences. (Among the reader’s final instructions: “Quit classes. Quit jobs. Cash in old savings bonds. Now you have time like warts on your hands.”) The story does not, disappointingly, tell one how to become a writer—or at least this was the conclusion I came to when I first read it in a heavy class-assigned anthology. Its cover, which I spent a lot of time staring at, depicted a water-colored figure sitting peacefully at a library table, head bent in concentration as warm light poured in through the window behind them.