A desperate race

On Alice Munro

Good morning, friends. I’m going to write a little bit about Alice Munro today.

As I alluded to when I wrote about “The Progress of Love,” I came to Munro through other Canadian women writers. I was trying to reverse-engineer a literature specialty in college¹ and figured Women’s Literature with a focus on Canada in the 20th century would capture two of my favorites (Montgomery and Atwood, the latter of which I did eventually write my thesis on). Fortunately for me you can’t plan a course of study like that or even seriously consider it without finding Munro. I got her collections The Progress of Love and Dance of the Happy Shades, and devoured them. Later, I was given another half-dozen or so for Christmas the year she won the Nobel. It was the worst year of my life and a spectacularly bad Christmas, but it was a real gift to hole up in a corner with a stack of new paperbacks and lose myself in her work. While I wouldn’t necessarily call her work light or easy to ready, I think it’s fair to say that she’s a master of storytelling, levelling beautiful prose with compelling, engaging worldbuilding and characters that suck you in and make you eagerly turn the page. Not exactly typical escapism, but perfect for me.

In the work I found brilliant writing, of course, but specifically stories that center women and girls, and uncertain young women (or often women who are certain about foolish things), and especially rural people. There was poverty, and a lack of education, but only ever presented in a way that prioritized the humanity of it before the spectacle or sensational. Big cities are non-existent not in a way that still centers them as writing life— look how far away we are from civilization, etc— but in a natural perspective that understands (especially pre-internet) how rural communities function as their own ecosystems, the big city not a foil or the Big Bad conservative news would later make them but a non-entity, a shrug. College campuses, fertile soil for many of my other beloved writers (many of whom taught on them after attending them) are equally and largely shrugged off. While the “rural” area I grew up in is much different than the rural life of Munro (partly due to the difference in decades and the prevalence of cars but also in part due to life only getting so rural in the Mid-Atlantic; a half-hour drive to Lancaster City might not count for much but it was there), there was enough there and rendered so vividly that I felt, perhaps, it was worthwhile writing about my surroundings in the same way.

Wittingly or not, I teach myself to write through imitation. I write not because, as some others have described, I have a burning story inside me dying to get out, but because I love books and literature so much that I feel compelled to try and join in, to make an attempt to create something in the art form that has defined my life. As a child this looked like writing letters to an internet pen-pal imitating the wistful, romantic style of Anne Shirley; a few years later I would join a long-honored tradition of writing a Lord of the Rings knockoff novel (it was basically the same thing except with women in it, which honestly isn’t the WORST idea), and so on.

As I’ve gotten more practiced and learned how to, well, learn more than mimic, Munro’s work is always there for me, in the cadence of a story or the sharp prick of a single, essential sentence that turns it on its head. In her story “Miles City, Montana,” for example, the narrator gives us a vivid description of her relationship with her husband. She describes the specifics of a road trip they’re taking with their children, from his excitement over the car to his irritation when she forgets the lettuce on his sandwich (really) before moving out slightly to the bigger picture of their relationship, the ways she weighs the pros and cons of her feelings for him to try and find out what she actually feels, and the passionate way they fight and make up:

“I wished that I could get my feelings about Andrew to come together into a serviceable and dependable feelings… But I gave it up when I saw that all it proved is what I already knew — that I had violent contradictions. …

At the bottom of our fights we served up what we thought were the ugliest truths…

And finally—finally— racked and purged, we clasped hands and laughed, laughed at those two benighted people, ourselves. Their grudges, their grievances, their self-justification. We leap-frogged over them. We declared them liars. We would have wine with dinner, or decide to give a party.”

and then, immediately after, with no time wasted on transition:

“I haven’t seen Andrew for years, don’t know if he is still thin, has gone completely gray, insists on lettuce, tells the truth, or is hearty and disappointed.”²

And just like that the story moves on, back to the road trip with their children, eating dinner in Wentachee Washington, our perception of the story completed colored now by knowing how it ‘turns out.’ Munro does this both quickly— a single sentence in the middle of a twenty-page story— and without contrivance, placing the line perfectly at the end of a passage of character interiority, where even if we don’t expect it we understand how a character, reflecting back, would put that thought there. As funny as she frequently is I rarely find her stories entirely laugh-out-loud funny in a comedic sense. Humor comes from life, uncontrived, and like life needs to live right up against grief and boredom and love.

As I get older and the prospect of motherhood looms larger and becomes more terrifying with every narrative I read about its horrors, especially to creative women, I have become a little morbid about time running out, a no-win biological clock that will also explode the rest of my life. (Most of the time I know I’m being morbid, but sometimes I get worked up.) How comforting, then, to read Alice Munro and know that creative motherhood is possible (and not just possible but brilliant, aspirational). She talks about it honestly but matter-of-factly— in retrospect, then, her children grown— in her “Art of Fiction” interview with The Paris Review, from 1994:

INTERVIEWER

And you married young. It’s not as though you were anticipating a life as an aging spinster.

MUNRO

I think I knew that at heart I was an aging spinster.

…

INTERVIEWER

What about before the girls were old enough to go to school?

MUNRO

Their naps.

INTERVIEWER

You wrote when they had naps?

MUNRO

Yes. From one to three in the afternoon. I wrote a lot of stuff that wasn’t any good, but I was fairly productive. The year I wrote my second book, Lives of Girls and Women, I was enormously productive. I had four kids because one of the girls’ friends was living with us, and I worked in the store two days a week. I used to work until maybe one o’clock in the morning and then get up at six. And I remember thinking, You know, maybe I’ll die, this is terrible, I’ll have a heart attack. I was only about thirty-nine or so, but I was thinking this; then I thought, Well even if I do, I’ve got that many pages written now. They can see how it’s going to come out. It was a kind of desperate, desperate race. I don’t have that kind of energy now.

Alice was 92 when she died and left us a wonderful and expansive body of work; may we all be half as lucky.

With love,

C

---

What I’ve been reading, watching, & consuming lately:

• Interview with Alice Rohrwacher, director of La Chimera, in Little White Lies:
  “Napoleon came to Italy and opened a lot of tombs to take the vases. A generation has arrived that feels as if it’s not linked to the past, that feels different, that no longer believes in the sacred. So this story fascinated me. Then during the pandemic, when death entered our lives in such a way that was collectively important, I decided to write this film that also talks about our relationship with the world of death.”

• Grace Hebron for The Baltimore Beat on the Baltimore Abortion Fund

• “Nightjar,” by Christina D’Antoni, in fractured lit

• Nathan and I restarted Twin Peaks (not that we ever really need a reason, but Blank Check is covering David Lynch this fall³, so we’re planning ahead). Please consider that a general recommendation, but also we’ve been wondering aloud where the reclamation projects for so much of this talent is. Why isn’t someone making a Dana Ashbrook vehicle?

• Nutella ice cream cones on the Rehoboth boardwalk

• Jami Attenberg’s #1000WordsofSummer is starting June 1!

• Ayo Edebiri profiled in Vanity Fair by Leah Faye Cooper, photographed exquisitely by Renell Madrano. I’m mad at VF because they ruined one of my favorite movie podcasts (Little Gold Men) but even I have to admit this is good! I liked this small note on her background:
  “She grew up Pentecostal and church was more or less her second home. While she enjoyed singing with the youth choir and bonding with other kids, “it was horrible for my anxiety,” she says. “I was petrified of death. I was petrified of the rapture.” At NYU, she struggled to reconcile the Church’s idea that her gay and Muslim friends wouldn’t make it to heaven. “It was genuinely breaking my brain and giving me so much stress and sadness,” she says. “I was just like, ‘I need a break.’ ” Save for the occasional trip to church with her parents, she’s still on one.”

• Speaking of The Bear, Jason Diamond’s walk with Ebon Moss-Bacharah for GQ is a delight.

• Evil library news out of Idaho. (The news/the government is evil, not the library, to be clear.)

• Saw I Saw The TV Glow this week (finally came to Baltimore) and while I haven’t quite digested my thoughts on it it was extremely interesting, with compelling visuals and music. More tk perhaps but worth seeing on the big screen, while it’s out.

1. Not actually something I would recommend, job-prospect-wise, but then you could say the same thing about all academia so at least I read some stuff I liked. Both schools I attended were egregiously light on Women’s Lit in general so I had to try something.

2. Munro, Alice. “Miles City, Montana.” The Progress of Love, p 87-88.

3. I’m also tentttttavily going to be in the PNW for a conference in October? OR, nor WA, but either way I’m ready to get in the mood 👀