Dear Life: Stories
By Alice Munro
The final four works in Dear Life, Alice Munro’s 13th collection of stories, are preceded by a brief author’s note. “Not quite stories,” they are “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.” Fair enough. To fictionalize one’s life is a fiction writer’s prerogative, and for decades, Munro has been writing stories that recall her own experience growing up in rural Ontario.
But with the next sentence, these not quite personal essays claim a unique status in the Munro canon: “I believe they are the first and last — and the closest — things I have to say about my own life.” That “last” feels a bit chilling, an inevitable reminder that she is 81 years old. Still, what Munro devotee wouldn’t also feel a rush of excitement at this promise of intimacy?
In the book’s closing section, Munro draws us into the world of her childhood.
We learn that young Alice saw (or believed she saw) a young woman’s eyelid move inside the woman’s coffin. She watched another young woman weeping after a dance, and marveled at the way her male companions offered comfort, “as if she was so fine and valued a creature that whatever it was, whatever unkindness had come near her, was somehow a breach of a law, a sin.”
Despite Munro’s family’s financial hardship and her mother’s illness, she considered herself “a lucky person.” We see the influences on a young girl — the things she sees, and wonders at, and believes — that will hold court in her imagination throughout her life.
Munro’s autobiographical narratives, along with most of the other stories in the collection, unfold in a time when children with tuberculosis were sent to sanitariums, a million dollars was a lot of money and “devotion to anything, if you were female, could make you ridiculous.” The stories take place in towns where the movie theater is called “the Capital,” where every stylish house has a piano, where a funeral offers the town’s “best show of liveliness.”
Munro grants a heartbreaking nobility to what, in inelegant therapeutic parlance, we might call coping mechanisms. In a story titled Pride, the narrator’s harelip saves him from World War II, but it also renders him “a neuter” to a beautiful female friend, who proposes the two “live together like brother and sister.”
In the man’s later years, someone suggests that surgery could do wonders. “She was right,” he reflects. “But how could I explain that it was just beyond me to walk into some doctor’s office and admit that I was wishing for something I hadn’t got?”
We encounter characters schooled in stoicism, young people facing an incomprehensible world, and older people aged out of the world they’ve spent their lives trying to navigate. In To Reach Japan, a careless mother finds her little girl trapped between train cars, “not crying, not complaining, as if she was just to sit there forever and there was to be no explanation offered to her, no hope.”
In Dolly, an elderly couple has sensibly made plans for their deaths. Everything is settled, the narrator reports. “It was just the actual dying that had been left out or up to chance.” Still, she admits to being a little bothered by the “assumption that nothing more was going to happen in our lives.”
As trapped as many of the characters may be — by the mores of their times, by painful memories even a dedicated stoic can’t completely lock away — their stories suggest that perseverance, the determination to keep at the work of living, can invest a life with dignity.
In the autobiographical piece Night, Munro reveals that during her 14th summer she had trouble falling asleep. She was haunted by a thought: “that I could strangle my little sister, who was asleep in the bunk below me and whom I loved more than anybody in the world.” Tormented, she eventually confessed to her father. He had his own real-world demons to contend with, but his unruffled response, “People have those kinds of thoughts sometimes. … It happens in life,” was exactly what she needed.
“It set me down, but without either mockery or alarm, in the world we were living in,” Munro writes. For more than 40 years, she has been doing that for us. To read her wonderfully frank and compassionate stories is to feel that we are understood, whatever town we come from, whatever dreams or nightmares may disturb our sleep.