Dear Life, by Alice Munro

Having recently reread Munro’s first collection of short stories, I was eager to read this, her last. Much is unchanged: the stories are still mostly set in small towns in rural Ontario; many are about women struggling for agency in a conservative culture; and there’s a lot of leaving and returning home.  

What has changed is the depth, a willingness to take on even darker themes, and even more complex characters. “Pride” and “Corrie” feature characters with physical disabilities, exploring issues of sexuality, gender, and class. In other stories, such as “Amundsen” and “Haven,” men inhabit their male privilege without apology, leaving the women in their lives to piece out a life from whatever’s left.

Some of the stories explore aging: a character beginning to experience the onset of dementia (“In Sight of the Lake”), a couple choosing where to end their lives (“Dolly”). Other stories are from a child’s viewpoint. “Gravel” in particular is interesting because the first-person narrator seems to be telling the story of loss and memory as a child. Only later do we come to understand that this is a grown woman looking back.

Whatever their ages, Munro’s people exhibit what one reviewer called “bravery, steadiness and stoic grace.”

As an author, my biggest takeaway from this collection—and indeed from Munro’s entire oeuvre—is to trust the reader. I’m one of those people who likes to fix things. An engineer in my day job, I’m always on the alert for a solution, so I still struggle to remember to ask a distraught friend if they want potential solutions (with a risk analysis of each) or a listening ear. As a result, I sometimes find myself explaining too much to forestall a complaint of I don’t get it or Why did the character do that?

Munro seems to have no such qualms. Much is left unexplained in these stories, leaving some people disgruntled, as a glance at Goodreads shows. What she’s really doing is leaving openings for us as readers to bring our own experiences to the table. Like white space in a poem, these openings encourage us to engage with the story. They force us to interpret for ourselves the actions and motivations of her characters.

At times she is more direct: “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do – we do it all the time.”

The story that fascinated me most was “Train,” about a soldier returning from the war who, nearing his destination, jumps off the train and walks away. It reminded me of Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years which begins with the protagonist simply walking away from her family on a Delaware beach, a scene which has stayed with me for 28 years.

“Jumping off the train was supposed to be a cancellation. You roused your body, readied your knees, to enter a different block of air. You looked forward to emptiness. And instead, what did you get? An immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting on the train and just looking out the window. What are you doing here? Where are you going?”

When you walk away from one life, what do you walk into? I imagined him there, holding on for dear life and then letting go.  

The last four pieces are different. She says, “The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life.”

I found them interesting in their own right, seeing the seeds of many stories. As writers, we do take bits of our experience and transform them as only one tessera in the mosaic of a story. We get some hints of her creative process when she describes a neighbour’s house in rural Ontario “… that we would never visit or know and that was to me like a dwarf’s house in a story. But we knew the man who lived there… Roly Grain his name was, and he does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life.”

The choice of what four things to write about also intrigued me. They are a reminder that it’s not necessarily the obvious events, like marriage or having a child, that change and shape you. It could be the small, seemingly trivial events that have made you into the person you are. And thus her choice of subject matter over the course of her career comes into focus: the moments that make a life. And thus life itself. “So immense an enchantment.”

If you were to choose four incidents from your early life that most affected who you are today, what would they be?

Author Tours

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When I went to Toronto many years ago to visit my son who had moved there, he took me on a tour of the city to show me the places in Michael Ondaatje’s masterful novel In the Skin of a Lion. I had loved the novel, along with the other Can Lit books my son had recommended (Timothy Findley, Alistair MacLeod, Jane Urquhart, David Adams Richards, Margaret Laurence, etc.) at that time not available in the U.S. Somehow, seeing the actual places mentioned in Ondaatje’s book made it come alive for me in a different way.

Perhaps you have had this experience. If you read a book set in a place you know well, you have a different relationship with the story. When I read an Anne Tyler book or one by Laura Lippman, I recognise the places in and near Baltimore that they mention, and the story becomes that much more real.

A few years ago when I was in Edinburgh, I went on an Ian Rankin tour. His books are true works of literary art, and I highly recommend them. I first found one in a Toronto bookstore; they weren’t available in the U.S. and the online bookstore thing hadn’t taken hold yet. He immediately became one of my favorite authors, and I’ve enjoyed watching his immense talent increase with every book, especially those featuring detective John Rebus.

The tour was fun, taking us to places that cropped up in his books as well as to buildings where he and fellow Edinburgh authors lived. I also made an effort to look on my own for things referenced in his books, such as the miniature coffins found on Arthur’s seat and Rebus’s favorite bar.

Recently I enjoyed a tour in Quebec City that took us to places mentioned in Louise Penny’s Bury the Dead. Seeing where the incidents in the story took place, following Inspector Gamache’s footsteps, enjoying the restaurants and bistros mentioned made the story real in an entirely different way. If nothing else, I saw how short a distance it was in some cases from one place to another, making it easier to understand how Gamache could move so quickly between them.

Our tour guide Marie had some inside information: Penny herself had stayed in the house where Gamache stayed with his friend Emil in the story. Marie had seen inside and verified that it matched the description, just as we could verify the descriptions of other, more public places mentioned.

Marie speculated that Penny had eaten in these restaurants, ridden the funicular, visited the Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Quebec. I thought: Of course she did! That’s how you research a book. All good writers do that.

When you travel, I encourage you to read novels set there and, if possible, take a tour of the places mentioned. Let me know how that changes your perception of the book.

Have you ever taken a tour of places mentioned in an author’s book? If you read a book set in a place you know well, how is the experience different?

Selected Poems II, 1976-1986, by Margaret Atwood

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I came to Atwood through her fiction, but it is her poetry that has come to mean the most to me. For me, her poems from this period expressed my own complicated mix of sorrow, pity, praise, and controlled rage.

As in her fiction, Atwood sometimes uses a female protagonist to shed new light on social issues. Most poems about the myth of Orpheus focus on his divine music and tragedy of his trip to the underworld to bring his wife Eurydice back to the realm of the living. However, Atwood’s “Orpheus (1)” gives us the voice of Eurydice who says, “the return/to time was not my choice.” She speaks of his “old leash . . . love you might call it” and says:

Before your eyes you held steady
the image of what you wanted
me to become: living again.
It was this hope of yours that kept me following.

In these few lines, Atwood captures the frustration of women wanting to be seen for themselves, not something to be molded to their husband’s fantasy, along with the patient kindness, the desire to spare him hurt that keeps us silent.

Myths and fairy tales are subtexts in many of these poems. In “Variation On The Word Sleep”, she alludes to several fairy tales, including one of my favorites: The Twelve Dancing Princesses.

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands . . .

Atwood’s Canadian identity has informed much of her critical work, including her landmark book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Published in 1972, it makes a case that Canadian literature reflects a unique national identity, one derived from the harsh conditions in the frozen north and the clear-eyed accounts by early pioneers trying to survive in the wilderness. This somber theme works its way through many of the poems in this collection, sometimes emerging in strong, unpretty images. In “Flying Inside Your Own Body”, for example, she describes

Waking, your heart is a shaken fist,
a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in;
the sun’s a hot copper weight pressing straight
down on the thick pink rind of your skull.

That sense of the landscape as something hostile is tempered by her ecological awareness and sometimes difficult love for the things of this world. In “Marsh, Hawk” she describes a swamp and “a mass grave” of detritus—rotten trees, old tires, bottles and cans—that “spreads on the / land like a bruise.” But the poem takes a left turn in the middle, as so many of Atwood’s poems do, as the speaker wants the marsh rushes / to bend aside, the water / to accept us”, to become one with the complicated beauty of the physical world.

In much of her writing, Atwood draws inspiration from historical figures, particularly Canadian ones, such as Susanna Moody. Some of the poems in this collection seem to draw on this awareness. Sometimes she seems to be speaking for those who came before us.

In Negotiating with the Dead, a collection of her Empson lectures, she says, “Not just some, but all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and fascination with mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.”

What themes or preoccupations do you see in one of your favorite writers?