Dear Life - Alice Munro

 

Dear Life, published in 2012, was Alice Munro’s last book. She won the Nobel Prize the following year, becoming the first and only Canadian for having done so. At the time, she was called a “master of the contemporary short story,” and I very much agree with that assessment of her talents.

Dear Life contains fourteen short stories, the final four of which Munro tells us are based upon her own life:

“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.” (Page 233)

Most of the stories involve small town women whose ordinary lives are forever changed by a chance meeting or occurrence they can never stop thinking about, sometimes even after they are the only one left who remembers what really happened.

In “Train,” my favorite of the stories, for example, a young World War II soldier returning to rural Canada, jumps off the train one town before arriving back in his hometown. He begins walking down the track in the direction he’s come from, and stumbles upon a rundown farm in need of numerous repairs. The woman who lives there alone asks for help, and the man ends up living there for years, never going home. But that’s not even the strangest thing about how their relationship evolves.

In another story, “Dolly,” the pre-World War II girlfriend of a woman’s husband coincidentally shows up at her front door one morning years later selling cosmetics door to door. Lives are changed in ways unforeseen just a few hours earlier. 

Over and over again lives are changed in an instant.

These are stories where sheer chance changes everything for the small town characters involved. Some are led into life-changing experiences by people wandering through their lives on a whim; some are powerfully impacted by the single decision they did or did not make; some wish they had escaped small town Canada when they had the chance; others wish they had never left. The stories are about real people living during and around the World War II years, a time when many were seeking ways to change - or put back together - their lives. It is a time when nothing seems impossible - so chances are taken.

Surprisingly, the least affective stories for me are the autobiographical ones, probably because I could not forget they are somewhere between memoir and short story. As a reader, I found myself wondering over and over where the truth stopped and the fiction began. That is probably not something that will bother all, or even most readers, but it kept me from losing myself in the stories enough to really enjoy them. 

Alice Munro is an excellent short story writer, and I look forward to reading much more of her work. Luckily, she wrote fourteen collections of short stories and one novel between 1968 and 2012. Lots to look forward to.