Dear Life: Stories

Munro's stories are full of smart young women wryly observing men's desire for dominance and other women's collusion with their own subservience. In "Dolly", the narrator observes of a love rival, "men are charmed by stubborn quirks if the girl is good-looking enough… all that delight in the infantile female brain."

But it would be wrong to think of Munro as a chronicler of the particular disappointments of being female: she draws men just as well. There is a heartbreaking portrayal of a widowed policeman in "Leaving Maverley". Despite the inevitable end of his wife's lengthy and terminal illness, he realises as he leaves the hospital: 'He'd thought that it had happened long before with Isabel, but it hadn't. Not until now. She had existed and now she did not… And before long, he found himself outside, pretending that he had as ordinary and good a reason as anybody else to put one foot ahead of the other."

There is an interesting diversion at the end of this book: the final four stories are, in Munro's own words, "not quite stories… the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life." A less well-known writer would not be allowed to lift her hands and say, "Look, there are some bits here, and I'm not sure what they are, but there you go," but they are delightful additions to this collection. Plainer, with a slightly more bitter edge, than the "fictional" stories that precede them, they are a tantalising glimpse of the memoir Munro fans would swoon for, should she choose to write it. The first indeed – but let's hope she changes her mind and makes them not the last.

After the first 10 short stories in her new collection, Alice Munro inserts a single paragraph on an otherwise blank page, under the heading, Finale: “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.”

“Dear Life” describes the house Munro lived in when she was growing-up in Wingham, Ontario, where her mother was a schoolteacher and her father a fur and poultry farmer. “This is not a story, only life,” she notes, signalling the pathways, names, coincidences that might have been woven into her fiction, but here are present as memories.

“The Eye” is the most majestic of Munro’s monuments to memory. She remembers being taken, the year she started school, to see the dead body of a young woman whom her mother had hired to help after the birth of Munro’s younger siblings. Encouraged to look into the coffin, she thought she saw the young woman slightly open one eye: a private signal to her alone. “Good for you,” her mother said, as they left the grieving household.
It is fascinating to compare this with the end of the story “Amundsen” earlier in the collection. Two people who were lovers long ago meet unexpectedly crossing a Toronto street.
The man opens one of his eyes slightly wider than the other and asks, “How are you?” “Happy,” she says. “Good for you,” he replies.
In this book, Munro has laid bare the foundations of her fiction as never before. Lovers of her writing must hope this is not, in fact, her finale. But if it is, it’s spectacular.