By Melissa Steele
I was a teenager when I first read Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. In it, Munro wrestled with and articulated, as Leonard Cohen would call it, my secret life. She laid out my longing to get away from home, my sexual and romantic urges, my guilt, shame, boredom, and my ambition to write, and that feeling that I was of a place, specifically the place I grew up in, but still, because of my private imagination, an outsider there too.
As I grew up and began to write stories of my own, I read most of what Munro published, and as I read and reread her stories, I still had the delicious sensation of sharing secrets with a ruthlessly honest, insightful, articulate and wry friend, but I also saw more and more possibilities in her writing and therefore for my own. Her characters never came off as types but only as individuals, yet the themes of the day: feminism, isolation, the limits of free will and of responsibility, and the joys and disappointments of family life, love, and passion, resonated through them. There are few heroes in Munro’s work because her stories are committed to mulitplicity of voice. Events are viewed from not only several characters’ points of view, but from the same character’s evolving point of view through trauma and aging and losses and gains.
Yet time is always the main character in an Alice Munro story. No one is granted the standard literary luxury or tragedy of being frozen in a moment of victory or weakness or shame or freedom. In “Friend of My Youth” mother and daughter pass their opposing generational judgment on Flora, the mother’s friend who is robbed of the same potential husband twice in a long life of farming, scrubbing, praying and cheerful obedience. While the mother sees Flora as a martyr for her propriety and willingness to nurture her mad, childlike, suffering, fiancé-stealing sister, to the narrator daughter, Flora’s propriety, not the selfish lust of those who betray her, is the real evil. Mother and daughter and reader struggle to understand what Flora makes of her own life and fate but they never find out, and neither does the reader. In another story, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the long-suffering protagonist in her dementia stumbles upon both her sexual freedom and her revenge on her unfaithful but loving and loyal husband. Time does not heal all, it is not the great equalizer, but Munro will never let us forget that a life is more than a high or low moment, but a mismatched pastiche of past and present and future.
In John Cheever’s masterfully brief but perfectly complete story, “Reunion,” thirteen-year-old Charlie says of his father: “I felt that he was my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom. I knew that when I was grown, I would be something like him; I would have to plan my campaigns within his limitations.” I can’t but feel about Alice Munro the way that Charlle feels about his father. Munro defies and defines the infinite potential of the short story genre. I can only strive for something like her depth, her insight, her deftness, her slicing wit, her directness and her range. When I grow up, I want to write like Alice Munro.
When I Grow Up, I Want to Write like Alice Munro
Articles
By Melissa Steele
I was a teenager when I first read Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. In it, Munro wrestled with and articulated, as Leonard Cohen would call it, my secret life. She laid out my longing to get away from home, my sexual and romantic urges, my guilt, shame, boredom, and my ambition to write, and that feeling that I was of a place, specifically the place I grew up in, but still, because of my private imagination, an outsider there too.
As I grew up and began to write stories of my own, I read most of what Munro published, and as I read and reread her stories, I still had the delicious sensation of sharing secrets with a ruthlessly honest, insightful, articulate and wry friend, but I also saw more and more possibilities in her writing and therefore for my own. Her characters never came off as types but only as individuals, yet the themes of the day: feminism, isolation, the limits of free will and of responsibility, and the joys and disappointments of family life, love, and passion, resonated through them. There are few heroes in Munro’s work because her stories are committed to mulitplicity of voice. Events are viewed from not only several characters’ points of view, but from the same character’s evolving point of view through trauma and aging and losses and gains.
Yet time is always the main character in an Alice Munro story. No one is granted the standard literary luxury or tragedy of being frozen in a moment of victory or weakness or shame or freedom. In “Friend of My Youth” mother and daughter pass their opposing generational judgment on Flora, the mother’s friend who is robbed of the same potential husband twice in a long life of farming, scrubbing, praying and cheerful obedience. While the mother sees Flora as a martyr for her propriety and willingness to nurture her mad, childlike, suffering, fiancé-stealing sister, to the narrator daughter, Flora’s propriety, not the selfish lust of those who betray her, is the real evil. Mother and daughter and reader struggle to understand what Flora makes of her own life and fate but they never find out, and neither does the reader. In another story, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the long-suffering protagonist in her dementia stumbles upon both her sexual freedom and her revenge on her unfaithful but loving and loyal husband. Time does not heal all, it is not the great equalizer, but Munro will never let us forget that a life is more than a high or low moment, but a mismatched pastiche of past and present and future.
In John Cheever’s masterfully brief but perfectly complete story, “Reunion,” thirteen-year-old Charlie says of his father: “I felt that he was my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom. I knew that when I was grown, I would be something like him; I would have to plan my campaigns within his limitations.” I can’t but feel about Alice Munro the way that Charlle feels about his father. Munro defies and defines the infinite potential of the short story genre. I can only strive for something like her depth, her insight, her deftness, her slicing wit, her directness and her range. When I grow up, I want to write like Alice Munro.