Dear Life: Stories
Alice Munro, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307743725
Summary
In story after story in this brilliant new collection, Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human: a soldier returning from war and avoiding his fiancée, a wealthy woman deciding whether to confront a blackmailer, an adulterous mother and her neglected children, a guilt-ridden father, a young teacher jilted by her employer.
Illumined by Munro’s unflinching insight, these lives draw us in with their quiet depth and surprise us with unexpected turns. And while most are set in her signature territory around Lake Huron, some strike even closer to home: an astonishing suite of four autobiographical tales offers an unprecedented glimpse into Munro’s own childhood. Exalted by her clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, Dear Life shows how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth— Birth—July 10, 1931
• Where—Wingham, Ontario, Canada
• Education—University of Western Ontario
• Awards—Nobel Prize for Literature; Man Booker Prize;
3 Governor General's Literary Awards; Giller Prize;
National Book Critics Circle Award; Trillium Book Award;
Marian Engel Award; Lorne Pierce Medal; Foreign
Honorary Member, American Academy Arts & Letters
• Currently—lives in Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British
Columbia
Even though Alice Munro is known for her love stories, don't mistake her for just another romance writer. Munro never romanticizes love, but rather presents it in all of its frustrating complexity. She does not feel impelled to tack happy endings onto her tales of heartbreak and healing. As a result, Munro's wholly credible love stories have marked her as a true original who spins stories that are as honest as they are dramatic.
Alice Munro got her start in writing as a teenager in Ontario, and published her first story while attending Western Ontario University in 1950. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled Dance of the Happy Shades, would not be published until 1968, but when it arrived, Munro rapidly established herself as a unique voice in contemporary literature. Over the course of fifteen short stories, Munro displayed a firmly focused vision, detailing the loves and life-altering moments of the inhabitants of rural Ontario. Munro takes a gradual, methodical approach to unraveling her stories, often developing a character's perspective through several paragraphs, only to demolish it with a single, biting sentence. Yet she also explores those heartbreaking delusions of her characters with humanity, undercutting the bitterness with genuine compassion.
Munro was instantly recognized for her debut collection of stories, winning the prestigious Governor General's Award in Canada. Monroe would then spend the majority of her career writing short stories rather than novels. "I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way—what happens to somebody—but I want that 'what happens' to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness," she explained to Random House.com. "I want the reader to feel something is astonishing—not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me."
Munro would write only one novel, Lives of Girls and Women, a coming-of-age tale about a young girl named Del Jordan, which is actually structured more like a collection of short stories than a typical novel. Throughout the rest of her work, she would continue to explore themes of love and the way memories shape one's life in short story collections such as Friend of My Youth, Open Secrets, the award-winning The Love of a Good Woman, and Runaway
Because her stories are so unencumbered by cliches and speak with such clarity and truthfulness, it is often assumed that Munro's work is largely autobiographical. The fact that she chooses to set so many of her tales in her hometown only fuel these assumptions further. However, Munro says that very little of her material is based on her own life, and takes a more creative approach to inventing her finely developed characters. "Suppose you have—in memory—a young woman stepping off a train in an outfit so elegant her family is compelled to take her down a peg (as happened to me once)," she explains, "and it somehow becomes a wife who's been recovering from a mental breakdown, met by her husband and his mother and the mother's nurse whom the husband doesn't yet know he's in love with. How did that happen? I don't know."
As Munro grows older, her themes are turning more and more toward illness and death, yet she continues to display a startling vitality and youthfulness in her writing. A writer with a long and celebrated career, Alice Munro's work is just as compelling, honest, and insightful as ever.
Extras
• Munro dropped out of college in 1951 to marry fellow student James Munro. The couple opened a bookstore in Victoria, had three children, and divorced in 1972. Munro continues to live in Canada with her second husband, geographer Gerald Fremlin.
• Munro wrote on a typewriter for a good part of her career, calling herself a "late convert to every technological offering" in a publisher's interview. "I still don't own a microwave oven," she says. (From Barnes and Noble.). (From .)
Book Reviews
One of the great short story writers not just of our time but of any time.
New York Times Books Review
Wise and unforgettable. Dear Life is a wondrous gift; a reminder of why Munro’s work endures.
Boston Globe
Unquestionable evidence of her unfaded abilities.... Reading these stories will tell you something about Alice Munro’s life, but it will tell you more about Alice Munro’s mind—and, not entirely surprisingly, this proves to be even more compelling
New Republic
Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished.... Dear Life is as rich and astonishing as anything she has done before.
New York Review of Books
There is no writer quite as good at illustrating the foibles of love, the confusions and frustrations of life or the inner cruelty and treachery that can be revealed in the slightest gestures and changes of tone. . . . The stories of Dear Life violate a host of creative writing rules, but they establish yet again Munro’s psychological acuity, clear-eyed acceptance of frailties and mastery of the short story form.
Washington Post
Alice Munro demonstrates once again why she deserves her reputation as a master of short fiction.
O, The Oprah Magazine
Exquisite.... No other author can tell quite so much with quite so little. The modest surfaces of Munro’s lapidary sentences conceal rich veins of ore.
Chicago Tribune
Munro’s wonderfully frank and compassionate stories suggest that perseverance, the determination to keep at the work of living, can invest a life with dignity through the end of one’s days.
San Francisco Chronicle
Absorbing.... Most haunting of all are the four autobiographical sketches that end the book, which display Munro’s gift of observation and ability to trace big emotional arcs in short brushstrokes.
Entertainment Weekly
Munro’s best collection yet.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Remarkable.... Masterfully evokes the relationship between people and the places they inhabit.
Time Out New York
Munro has an uncanny knack of convincing the reader that the characters have real lives before the stories commence and continuing existences after.... This is simply a good writer doing what she loves.
Guardian (UK)
In acknowledging Alice Munro’s pre-eminence in the world of contemporary short fiction it’s become fashionable to describe her as the ‘Canadian Chekhov,’ but that title barely hints at the scope of her literary influence. Dear Life, her 13th collection, only serves to burnish her reputation for creating intelligent, sophisticated stories out of inarguably humble materials.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Virtuosic.... Encompass a wide variety of always-unpredictable characters—young, old, middle-aged—caught in circumstances that have the bright erratic flow of life itself.
Seattle Times
Munro is who she is, and we are fortunate to have her. No other author can contain so much life, and so many lives, in such few pages.... They can be read over and over, dependably revealing more with each reading
Miami Herald
Alice Munro has long been acknowledged as one of Canada’s literary treasures. This new volume, with its historical slant, its autobiographical material, its impressionistic descriptions of scenery, its occasional nostalgia and pleasing irony, confirms her reputation.
Washington Times
How does Munro manage such great effects on a relatively small canvas? It’s a question that most anyone who has seriously attempted to write a short story in the last 20 years has pondered.... Munro has a genius, no empty word here, for selecting details that keep unfolding in the reader’s mind.
Los Angeles Times
Reading Alice Munro is like drinking water—one hardly notices the words, only the marvel at being quenched.... Behind each sentence is a world, conjured more distinctly than in many an entire novel.
Plain Dealer
Alice Munro...has earned every bit of her reputation as being one of the best living short story writers, in English if not in the entire world.... This collection represents fiction at its finest—captivating, complex, lifelike.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
These stories are perfect.... Dear Life is a collection as rich and surprising as any in Alice Munro’s deep career.
National Post
Alice Munro has always been the poet of the unexpected passion that comes seemingly out nowhere and changes a character’s life.... She is, and has been for decades, one of our most important writers, one whose work represents all the most essential and pleasurable aspects of literature, and which reminds us of what great literature is: You know it when you see it.
Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Munro can depict key moments without obscuring the reality of a life filled with countless other moments—told or untold. in her 13th collection, she....feature[s] the precision of her fiction with the added interest of revealing the development of [her] eye and her distance from her surroundings, both key, one suspects, in making her the writer she is.... [R]ead together, the stories accrete, deepen, and speak to each other.
Publishers Weekly
Every new collection from the incomparable Munro...is cause for celebration. This new volume offers all the more reason to celebrate as it ends with four stories the author claims are the most autobiographical she has written.... In every story, there is a slow revelation that changes everything we thought we understood about the characters. Verdict: Read this collection and cherish it for dear life. —Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., ON
Library Journal
A revelation, from the most accomplished and acclaimed of contemporary short story writers. It's no surprise that every story...is rewarding and that the best are stunning. They leave the reader wondering how the writer manages to invoke the deepest, most difficult truths of human existence in the most plainspoken language.... The author knows what matters, and the stories pay attention to it.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
I. “To Reach Japan”
1. What are Greta’s feelings toward her husband and her marriage as she is leaving for Toronto? What remains unspoken between them? 2. Discuss what Katy understands and experiences on this journey (see especially the description at the bottom of page 26). What does Katy feel about Greg, and then about Harris Bennett? Why does Munro end the story as she does, with Katy pulling away from her mother? Does the story suggest that there is an inevitable cost when a woman attempts to break through the limitations of her life?
3. Discuss the paragraph beginning, “It would become hard to explain, later on in her life, just what was okay in that time and what was not” (6), in light of Greta’s actions. She is a poet: How troubling is the gap between her identities as wife and mother, and as poet and artist?
II. “Pride”
1. What do Oneida and the narrator have in common? How are they very different? The narrator is embarrassed that she has taken care of him when he was ill, and assumes that he is “like a neuter to her” (146–147). Why does he misunderstand Oneida’s willingness to care for him, and her desire to live with him (148)?
2. What does the sight of the baby skunks evoke, at the end of the story? What light does the narrator’s preface (133-34) bring to your sense of what has happened between him and Oneida?
III. “Corrie”
1. As in “Pride,” a man underestimates a woman who is attached to him: discuss what is different about the motivations and desires of the characters in the two stories.
2. How surprising is it when Corrie realizes that Howard has been keeping the money supposedly meant for Lillian’s blackmail payments? How does Corrie figure this out? How do you interpret the final paragraph?
IV. “Train”
1. After the removal of a tumor, Belle is in a strange state of mind and tells Jackson about what happened on the day her father stepped in front of an oncoming train (196-98). She is relieved to have spoken about this memory. What effect does this conversation have on Jackson? What makes Jackson decide not to return to the hospital, or to Belle’s house, which he stands to possibly inherit?
2. Do the story of Jackson’s relationship with Ileane Bishop, and what we learn about his stepmother’s abuse, offer an adequate explanation for Jackson’s transient life? What are the human costs, in this story, of what Belle calls “just the mistakes of humanity” (198)?
V. “In Sight of the Lake”
1. At what point do you understand that the narrator is having a dream? What strange details indicate this? What is dreamlike about the narrator’s efforts to find the doctor’s office?
2. In what ways does the story most accurately represent the disorientation and confusion that come with aging and memory loss?
VI. “Dolly”
1. Franklin wrote a poem about his passionate affair with Dolly just before the war, and now, when he is eighty-three, Dolly turns up selling cosmetics. Is the narrator’s reaction overblown?
2. What is comical or incongruous about this story? What does it say about the intersection of aging, memory, and passion?
VII. “The Eye”
1. What aspects of the mother’s behavior are troubling to her daughter and make her welcome an alliance with Sadie? What is admirable about Sadie, especially given the time period?
2. What is strange or uncanny about the idea that Sadie, in death, might have moved her eyelid? The narrator thinks, “this sight fell into everything I knew about Sadie and somehow, as well, into whatever special experience was owing to myself” (269). How do you interpret this moment and its meaning?
VIII. “Night”
1. The narrator attributes the strangeness of her thoughts that particular summer to a special status, “all inward,” conferred on her by learning that during a routine appendectomy, the doctor had removed a tumor “the size of a turkey’s egg” (275, 272). She says, “I was not myself” (276). What do you make of the narrator’s efforts to explain the reasons for her state of mind and the worry that she could strangle her little sister (277)?
2. How does the encounter with her father help the narrator to deal with her fear about her thoughts? Why is it significant to the impact of this encounter that in this family, emotional troubles or worries usually go unexpressed?
IX. “Voices”
1. How is the mother’s character revealed in her reaction to the presence of a prostitute at the dance, as channeled through the daughter’s observations? Why does the narrator find the voices of the soldiers so intriguing and so comforting?
2. What does the story express about the difficult relationship between mothers and daughters, especially regarding the mother’s supposed role as model and mentor in her daughter’s adolescence?
X. “Dear Life”
1. The title of this story comes from the account the mother gives the narrator of hiding her, when she was an infant, from a strange and threatening woman who used to live in the family’s house (318). This and other salient memories combine to create a picture of an often difficult family life: the mother’s physical decline, the failure of the father’s fox farm and his later work in a foundry, the failure of the narrator to return home for her mother’s funeral. Does this story seem to embrace the idea that a significant task for the writer is to extend understanding, imagination, and empathy into one’s own past, and to make amends for errors, cruelties, and misjudgments there? See question 4 below.
XI. Questions about Dear Life
1. What is the effect of the collection as a whole, given the order, pacing, and content of the stories? What view of life does it project?
2. Compare the treatment of women by men in “Train,” “Amundsen,” “Haven,” and “Corrie.” Why do these women allow themselves to be lied to or taken advantage of? What is the dynamic that permits an uneven power relationship?
3. Compare the endings of several stories. Do they end in a state of suspension or resolution? Think about how the endings invite questioning, reflection, and interpretation.
4. Discuss the last four stories in light of Munro’s brief introduction of them as “not quite stories,” as “autobiographical in feeling, though not . . . entirely so in fact,” and as “the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life” (255). Should they be read as if they were fictional stories, or somehow differently? If you were to tell four important stories from your own life, what would they be?
(Questions issued by publisher.)