5 ideas
Narrating your own heartbreak as imperative steps addressed to 'you' ('Meet in expensive beige raincoats') turns a private wound into a generic procedure. That lets the narrator describe humiliation without owning it. The frame also exposes her, because instructions imply the outcome was predictable and repeatable, so the 'you' is both a shield and a confession.
The self-help form promises that following steps produces mastery. Moore inverts it so that following the steps reliably produces disappointment. 'How to Become a Writer' opens by advising you to try to be anything else first, then lays out a path of rejection, bad workshops and alienated family, so the 'method' turns out to be a map of how lives actually go wrong.
The steps trace her growing realization that she is a role rather than a person: she waits, gets fitted around his real life, and begins to suspect she is one of several. Her attempt to feel chosen is steadily worn down into the knowledge that she is replaceable.
'How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)' moves backward year by year, from after the mother's death to the daughter's own infancy. The backward structure means grief comes first, and each earlier entry reads as something already lost, so the ending arrives at a beginning the reader knows cannot be kept.
Moore's characters answer despair with puns, deadpan jokes and absurd asides, and their wit peaks exactly where the damage is greatest. Read this way, a person's jokes are not evidence that they are coping but a map of what they cannot say directly. Humor becomes the visible edge of the grief underneath.