It had been a determined sort of humor, an intensity mirroring the intensity of the city, and it seemed to embrace and alleviate the hard sadness of people having used one another and marred the earth the way they had. It was like every brain was a sex maniac. First published in the New Yorker, the story is about a young boy who's been diagnosed with kidney cancer. Moore acknowledges a slight autobiographical element in the story but says she was not writing a memoir. And that's what fiction does.
Fiction can come from real-life events and still be fiction.
It's the latter. It was something I noticed as I was completing the last two stories. And then when I went back and read all the way through, every single story had the word bird in it, for some reason. Sometimes it's actual birds, sometimes metaphorical birds. But it's there for the taking, I guess.