Marie Lorena Moore was born in Glens Falls, New York, and nicknamed "Lorrie" by her parents.

[2] Upon graduation from Cornell, Moore was encouraged by a teacher to contact literary agent Melanie Jackson, who agreed to take her as a client.

[2] Moore's short story collections are Self-Help (1985), Like Life, the New York Times bestseller Birds of America, and Bark.

[7] Who Will Run the Frog Hospital is the story of a woman vacationing with her husband who recalls an intense friendship from her adolescence.

Of Moore's 2023 novel I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, The New Yorker's Parul Sehgal wrote: "One might say of Lorrie Moore what she said of Updike—that she is our greatest writer without a great novel—but how tinny ‘greatness’ can feel when caught in the inhabiting, staining, possessing power of a work of such determined strangeness and pain.

"[8] Moore has written a children's book entitled The Forgotten Helper, about an elf whom Santa Claus mistakenly leaves behind at the home of the worst child on his "good" list.

[10][11] Moore was the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she taught creative writing for 30 years.

[21] In 1999, Moore was named as the winner of the Irish Times International Fiction Prize for Birds of America.