Dear Readers, Today’s post is a re-post of my May 20 tribute to Alice Munro as I participate in ’s virtual celebration in honor of the late author via her newsletter . If you’ve joined The Booktender recently, this will be new for you. And for everyone, I am also including a link to the next installment of the BookStack Directory live today. Have a great Thursday!
BookStack Directory: Part 4
Today I want to share a personal tribute to Alice Munro. Her stories have moved me to a new understanding of the generational ebb and flow from country life to town life and back again within my own family—and the emotive landscape of what a mother wants for her daughter and what a daughter wants for herself accompanying those shifts. Reading her work at different phases of my life has taught me how to let a story change me.
Why then, when curating my May reading challenge focused on short works, did I not include Munro, a Nobel Prize winner described by the Swedish Academy as “a master of the contemporary short story” and whose “practically perfect” body of work also earned her the Man Booker International Prize?
I crossed both Dear Life and Runaway off the top of my potential May list in an early round of culling in part because it seemed a bit “evil-eye” to highlight the last book in the career of a retired 92-year old writer in the context of a reading challenge focused on completion, at a time when she was still with us on this plane of existence.
But even more than that superstitious reason, I wondered: what would my readers really gain from my highlighting an eminence like Alice Munro? After all, Dear Life was less critically acclaimed than her earlier works and yet it sold over 300,000 of the 1.2 million copies of her books sold in her lifetime. It’s likely you’ve heard of it, and her, before her death on May 13.
For Runaway and The Love of a Good Woman, Munro was twice recognized with Canada’s Giller Prize, the largest fiction prize purse in the country. And as I prepared my list, I remembered the story of Munro withdrawing her book Too Much Happiness from consideration in 2009, explaining that she wanted a newer writer to win. In no way does being featured on The Booktender equate to a prestigious national prize, but I realized I could follow her example and choose to provide attention, however humble, to a less well-known short story writer with a career still ahead of her.
So instead I used Munro’s own words for how she hoped her writing would work on readers to choose a writer whose debut short story collection also renders the lives of a specific local people visible: “Not so that they would say, ‘Oh isn’t that the truth?’ but so that everything the story has to tell moves the reader in a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish it.”
The format of the recorded Nobel interview I took those words from itself says much about Alice Munro’s lack of concern about getting invited to the party. While she was not the first to decline to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony to receive her award for “health reasons” (the news of the time also offered that phrase in quotation marks), others in similar circumstances typically send a publisher or relative to deliver the traditional remarks as Doris Lessing did in 2007. Instead, Munro conceded only to a video interview.
It was conducted by a Swede whose questionable apprehension of her aims as a (he made sure to point out) college dropout, housewife, woman writer Munro masterfully tucked into his pipe so he could smoke it. When he asked if she would have written differently had she’d finished college, if she’d ever found herself discouraged in her writing, she admitted when she compared herself to others who wrote more academically at first she’d been daunted. But, she said, “I worked in a way that comforted and pleased myself more than it followed some idea.”
She’s known for stories highlighting a small-town young woman or girl who, through winning a scholarship or some other means of ingenuity and self-preservation, opens possibilities for herself beyond what those around her offer. Her stories zoom in and out across spans of time, allowing the characters to revisit moments of emotional significance from a position of greater psychological and other resources and so to act as witnesses to their own transformation.
The four works that make up the finale of Dear Life offered me a lens for how to witness this transformation in a life as in a story. Munro described these as “not quite stories… autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact… the first and last—and the closest—thing I have to say about my own life.” In these, the narrator explores her relationship to her mother and especially the quiet resistance to the mother’s expectations of how to be and what to feel or say. One autobiographical truth: being invited to and showing up for the party were always more Munro’s mother’s concern than her own.
I recognize the dynamics in my own relationship to my mother in these works, down to the detail of the mother wishing they had a sidewalk for the girl, so she could rollerskate and make friends. My mother had grown up as a Valley girl, in a neighborhood of sidewalks and backyard pools provided for her by parents who had left a ranch in Colorado (her father) and a farm in Kansas (her mother) for a sunnier Los Angeles life. But she had left that behind for my working class father’s back-to-the-land dreams. She followed him to six acres outside a small town Minnesota, near the place his own mother had been raised, and then to small hill in Northern Arizona where tumbleweeds filled the surrounding ditches and she wished out loud for sidewalks for her children.
The “dilemmas of the adolescent girl coming to terms with family and small town” arc parallels my own experience of launching myself from that windy hill— outside of a town where pregnancy near high school graduation was a common path for young women— to college, with additional stops in Madrid and Santiago on the way to the career and later-in-life marriage that situate me in a different slice of society now.
But when I think of the short story by any author that has most moved and changed me in the way Munro said she aimed to do with her writing, I think of “Runaway.” In this title story from her 2004 collection, the main character follows an arc more similar to my mother’s than mine. Carla is a young woman from a middle class Toronto family she despises for the facts of “their house, their backyard, their photo albums, their vacations, their Cusinart, their powder room, their walk-in closets, their underground lawn sprinkling system.” Several years before the moments at the heart of the story, she abandoned the expected path through college to a good marriage, seeking a “more authentic kind of life.” She joins her husband in a rural mobile home, where she cares for a stable full of horses. Over time, her husband becomes extremely online at home and contentious in public. The riding lessons she offers diminish in demand from the locals, and money’s tight. To cope, she becomes attached to one of the goats they keep to help calm the horses. She begins to clean for an older woman who teaches at a college 40 miles away whose poet husband lies dying in the next room.
After the man dies, a tenderness from the widow brings Carla’s mother’s parting remark—she had no idea what she’d leave behind—home to roost. With the help of the neighbor, Carla flees toward Toronto, only to retrace her steps before dawn. She’ll remain in the life she’s chosen, despite a menacing realization: her missing pet goat may not have simply run away after all.
The knowledge of the truth unspoken sits “as if she had a murderous needle, somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully she could avoid feeling it. But every once in awhile she had to take a deep breath and it was still there.” Re-reading these stories and not-quite-stories from the deck of my own backyard swimming pool, I remembered an incident from my life that feels like something out of a Munro story.
For my prom, my mother and I had split the cost of a beaded satin vintage gown I found at a secondhand shop. It was strapless with a high slit. “It fits like it was made for you,” the saleswoman had said.
On the day of the dance, my mother told me she’d accidentally torn it the night before when she’d tried to add straps to ensure the dress would “stay where it belonged.” When I asked to see it, she’d said she’d gotten rid of it and took me back to the store to find something more “suitable.” Later that summer after my high school graduation, I’d found the dress hidden in storage in the same condition as when we’d purchased it.
I didn’t say a word then. I was already gone. But in my mid-twenties, I wrote to my mother and asked her to send the dress—I needed something to wear to a formal wedding. She sent it packed in tissue, with two ribbons sewn in as shoulder straps.
We learn the source of the title of Munro’s last book from the last piece in it. A mother rescues her infant from the perceived menace of a deranged neighbor who rummages in the baby carriage by scooping her up “for dear life.” The adult narrator of the piece was that infant, and later she discovers a more poignant explanation for the neighbor’s frenzied search of carriage.
I’m no stranger now to a mother’s capacity to perceive a threat to the exclusion of all other data and possibilities. I’m a generally conscientious and responsible person, but the summer before my daughter was born, I practiced putting one shoe into the backseat of my car before starting it for weeks before her due date. I felt I needed to build the habits to ensure I wouldn’t be one of those mothers on TV who had left their babies to die in a hot car.
My daughter was born just about two weeks before Munro’s Nobel prize was announced, and I read Dear Life during some of my first days as a mother. When I got to the final lines of her last published work, I held my breath:
I did not go home for my mother’s last illness or for her funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with. We could barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had a contempt for formal behavior, but why blame it on him? I felt the same. 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.
Factually true or not, this ending gave me a taste of a flavor of failure my wild imaginings had not yet considered. Distractedness or grasping aside, I could in fact raise my child to a respectable adulthood—only to realize she would not come to me when I reached my end.
But then I wondered about another possibility: to raise a daughter able to so completely give herself to her own life, to live free of concern for comforting me or pleasing others in the expected and conventional ways, might that not also be understood as the greatest success?
Yes. It would certainly be easier to forgive that success when your face, or your daughter’s face, ends up on a postage stamp.
As Lorrie Moore wrote in her own tribute to Munro in The Atlantic, “Because the story genre is end-oriented—one must stick the landing—she brought this power to her open endings as well, which were sometimes torn from the middle of the story and thrown down like a beating heart on an altar.”
I’m honoring a life rather than writing a story, and I’m unsure how to stick this landing except to say: My heart still beats for your stories, Alice Munro, and I believe they’ll continue to change it as long as I live.
Other Short Stories of Rural Life to Move You
The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories, a debut book of short stories by Stacie Shannon Denetsosie has been shortlisted for the Reading the West Debut Fiction Award. Follow the link to vote for it and other books by Western writers (including Arizona resident Safiya Sinclair’s memoir How to Say Babylon).
Between mobile homes and gas stations in the area surrounding the town of Kayenta on the Navajo nation, and the towns the tribal members move to in search of work, the Diné women who anchor this collection exist in stark conditions and exude joy at the same time.
The stories often upend expected tropes of teen pregnancy, abuse and disappearance through the women’s bonds of recognition with each other and their traditions. As with “Runaway”, the title story of Denetsosie’s collection also features a search for runaway livestock, in this case a lamb, and a ghostly ending guaranteed to move you.
Claire Keegan’s Foster spans one summer in which an eldest daughter is dropped in the Irish countryside under the care of distant relatives she’s never met, to lighten the load on the family as her mother welcomes the next addition to her brood. In the process, she discovers what is means to not only to want, but to have and to be wanted. Pick this one up if you want to be moved to love what you have just a little more than what came before, or what may yet be on its way.
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