On Seeing Shades of Grey; Unlocking Alice Munro After 40 Years

As an English Major at the University of Victoria in the mid-80’s, Alice Munro was on the syllabus. I was forced to read her.

I didn’t understand her stories. I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. A) they were just short stories, B) they were very ordinary in setting, time and character, and C) nothing seemed to happen (more on C in a moment.) Shakespeare made more sense to me than Alice Munro at the time. It’s why I never read any of her stories in the decades in between. Avoided her if I’m being honest. Which is embarrassing to admit.

My mind couldn’t absorb these stories in my youth. In my freshly minted adult world—away from home and family, I was forging a new path. There was good and bad. Moral and immoral. Black and white. There was no room for grey. Grey was where uncertainty existed, and I couldn’t afford to be uncertain.

Reading Alice Munro is a study in dichotomy. Especially with her female characters. Her mothers, daughters, wives and friends. You get a sense when reading that two opposing things are true at the same time. And it’s a bit of a mind-fuck.  

You can be a mother and leave your children.

You can be a friend and a betrayer.

You can be a husband and a philanderer.

A respected man of town and a molester. 

All stories set in small towns, or cities in and around Canada. The kind I lived in.

But I was 18 years old and sure that I was going places. Determined to get there (wherever ‘there’ might be.) I was leaving behind a world where I didn’t belong to create one where I did.

And Alice Munro confused the bejesus out of me.

Which is likely why I tilted more towards the utopian worlds of

Margaret Atwood

at the time. I needed black and white. Right and wrong.

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As luck would have it, the only book available at the library was Family Furnishings, Selected Stories from 1995-2014. I’ve been reading from this selection for the past three weeks.

Alice Munro isn’t for the faint of heart.

Her stories start simply:

“Kath and Sonje have a place of their own on the beach, behind some large logs. They have chosen this not only for shelter from the occasional sharp wind—they’ve got Kath’s baby with them—but because they want to be out of sight of a group of women who use the beach every day. They call these women the Monica’s.” Opening paragraph from Jakarta.

You skip along in the story thinking you know where you’re going only to find yourself in moral dilemma of your own making. Did he or didn’t he? Did she or didn’t she? You can be sure of something, but then not quite. As in life.

Where in my earlier years of reading Munro, “nothing seemed to happen” (see C above), now I see everything is happening all at once. There is something so ordinary and yet extraordinary, relatable and yet fantastical, proper and yet scandalous in each of her stories. You imagine each sentence and each word is chosen with great care and precision. For maximum impact.

Her stories leave the reader thinking to the point where you have to give yourself some time and space to absorb the story. To feel it fully.

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In The Children Stay, we meet Pauline, the wife of Brian, and mother of two young girls, Mara and Caitlin. They are on a family holiday with her in-laws on the east coast of Vancouver Island.¹

The story opens:

“Thirty years ago, a family was spending a holiday together on the east coast of Vancouver Island. A young father and mother, their two small daughters, and an older couple, the husband’s parents.”

It ends:

“Her children have grown up. They don’t hate her. For going away or staying away. They don’t forgive her, either. Perhaps they wouldn’t have forgiven her anyway, but it would have been for something different.”

This last line is a tell. Any mother with grown children can relate to this. If you read it too quickly, you might miss it.

The story was published in the New Yorker in December 1997. Munro would have been 66 years old.

As a reader, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of Alice was in her stories. How much of her inner life, inner desires, dreams and regrets were part of her own experience. The things we want to do, but can’t, or want to say, but don’t.

I read eight of her short stories from this collection: 

The Love of a Good Woman

Jakarta

The Children Stay

My Mother’s Dream

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Family Furnishings

The Bear Came Over the Mountain

Dear Life

Alice Munro needs to be savoured like fine wine. I was reading her in the 80’s as if I was drinking Baby Duck champagne.

My three weeks with this book are now up and I must return it to the library. Albeit a couple of days late. There are 27 holds on this one book alone. I’m back in the queue. No more avoiding Alice Munro. It’s taken 40 years of living a full life; I get it now Alice, I get it.

Thank-you for honing your craft for millions of us to enjoy—once we are cracked open enough to receive it.

Keep (un)Learning. KVB. Xo

What say you?

1. Do you ever go back and re-read books or authors?

2. If so, have they every surprised you or hit differently the second time around?

3. Which Alice Munro story have you read that’s been your favourite or most impactful?

1. In describing the setting of The Children Stay, I was engrossed. I could picture the exact beach in Parksville, BC, tides, logs, cabins and road she was describing. I was there thirty years ago with my own three young children. This longing and desire to escape was eerily familiar. The work it takes to go on vacation with young children is exhausting. And you forget. Alice brought it right back.