On reading the short story Differently, by Alice Munro

'We never behave as if we believed we were going to die.'

Photo by Jasper Garratt on Unsplash

I was a little upset when I started reading Differently. For a while, I had been bothered by something someone I was ordinarily friendly with had said, and I’d been doing that thing I know I shouldn’t do, turning the detail over again and again in my head, wondering what they had meant. I was dwelling on a moment that had passed, a word that was spoken offhand, had taken it way too much to heart. I needed to forget about it, get out of my head.

And so I did the thing I always do when I feel like this, and pulled a book of stories off my shelf. At the time, I’d been reading the collection Friend Of My Youth and Differently happened to be the next story in line. I didn’t have a clue what Differently was going to be about, and went into it blind, as I do most stories.

For some reason, and I don’t mind admitting this, I don’t always understand every Alice Munro story upon a first read. I need to re-read sentences, I need to pause, think, underline things. Sometimes something that appears on the first page makes little sense but then a reference is made to it seven thousand words later and it begins to connect.

Don’t get me wrong, this story is layered full of meanings and emotions, but it was also one of those rare Alice Munro stories that I could just read without feeling like I had to study it. What I mean is, and this is going to sound stupid but I’ll say it anyway - it reads like a story. And by that I mean: this is a story being told. This is what telling a story looks like (as opposed to showing it). And it works really, really well. Though it is admittedly a little complicated in terms of timeline (name me an Alice story that isn’t), going forwards and backwards and forwards again, I followed it wherever it was going to go. Because this is a story that felt like it was simply being told. A good old-fashioned story, an Alice story. And I needed that.

(That said - it isn’t straightforward and I have read it back at least four times since, trying to make sense of certain meanings, trying to understand the ending.)

Differently is the story of Georgia and Maya, who used to be friends but aren’t anymore. After I had finished reading, truthfully I felt devastated. I sat on the bed crosslegged and thought a lot about friendship, and how accidental it can sometimes be. How if it weren’t for the fact of a handful of coincidences, like where you live or where you or your children went to school, you might never even have been friends with so and so or such and such in the first place. This isn’t necessarily what the story is about. But it made me think a lot about how people come and go. About how you can know someone for so long, and then you just don’t.

If that sounds deeply pessimistic, know that this isn’t entirely a pessimistic story. It is, as with most Alice Munro stories, brutal about the way people can sometimes be. But it’s also entirely human. It’s saying: this is what happens, we deal with it.

But let’s stop there, and start with a synopsis, shall we?

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Georgia lives on a farm in Ontario with a man who used to be her former creative writing teacher. He told her once that her stories were too complicated. And that’s how this particular story begins.

One autumn, on impulse, Georgia decides to take a ferry across to Victoria where she used to live, back when she was married to Ben. Georgia’s in a strange mood, retracing her old life, walking past the house where she raised her sons and lived with Ben. She doesn’t seem to know what she’s doing back here but she has already made plans to visit the house where her friend Maya used to live, though Maya is now dead. Georgia has arranged to meet Maya’s husband Raymond, and it’s when she gets to Maya and Raymond’s house, the house Georgia once knew so well, that the story moves into memory. It’s here that Georgia begins remembering her life in Victoria and her friendship with Maya.

It was Ben, who was already friends with Raymond first, who introduced Georgia to Maya, all those years ago. He told Georgia she’d love Maya but Georgia was sceptical; she didn’t think much of Ben’s friends’ wives, they were all the same. But Ben was right. Maya was different. She was eclectic, non-conformist, a story teller who would take Georgia to restaurants and pretend for no obvious reason to be someone she wasn’t; a hippy, an Empire widow. Georgia loved how different Maya was, and Maya confided in her, telling her about affairs she’d had.

While Ben was away for a year with the navy, Georgia, who had two small children, got a part-time job in a bookstore and there she met a flirty customer called Miles, who quickly became her lover. Georgia talked about Miles with Maya all the time, told her they had said they loved each other. But one night, Georgia and Miles had a huge, horrible fight (Miles is a piece of work). Georgia waited hours for Miles to call her, so that they could make up, but when the phone finally rang, it was Maya instead. Maya told Georgia that something strange had happened - Miles had phoned her, and asked if he could come over to Maya’s house to talk instead. The women assumed that Miles must have wanted to seek advice from Maya on how how to put things right between him and Georgia again. And so they both agreed that Maya should talk to him, and Maya promised to call Georgia as soon as she had.

Georgia spent the whole night, waiting for that call. But it never came. And when it did it was too late. I don’t want to say that you can probably guess what happened, because that implies there’s something predictable about an Alice Munro story when really there isn’t, and also what does happen is so unexpected in the moment when you read it. But I will say that, eventually, Georgia never spoke to Miles or Maya again.

And I’ll leave it there, so you can read the rest of it. The story is not available online, but you can read it in the collection Friend Of My Youth.

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So: Differently opens with Georgia’s creative writing teacher, the man she now lives with in Ontario, telling her that her writing has ‘too many things going on at the same time.’ I have wondered whether someone might have said this to Alice Munro, and so she took it, made a joke of it. Because here is a story full of too many things, deliberately. There’s no reference made to the creative writing teacher again, and so my guess the purpose of this opening is to show the absurdity of his statement, because of course a story has too many things going on, because that’s what a story is. Because that’s what life is, right? Too many things, too many people. Always a muddle you have to figure out.

And that’s what Georgia appears to be doing, when we meet her in the present - figuring life out, figuring out how she got to where she is now. And she does that by going on this strange, impulsive visit to a place where she lived once, a place where everything changed.

It is a weird feeling, going back to somewhere where you used to be someone else, where you used to be younger, where your life was so different. I recognise this feeling. And it’s hard not to reminisce, not to wonder about what could have been, had you stayed. And so I really feel for Georgia, as she walks through her old neighbourhood, a voice in her head reproaching her, saying ‘what-for, what-for, what-for’ with every step.

But what’s missing in this story is, I think, the sense of regret - there’s uneasiness, the voice saying ‘what-for, what-for,’ but I don’t know that that’s the same as regret. It’s almost like she’s punishing herself, retracing her life as it once was. There’s no whiff of nostalgia here. And that feels, to me, so honest. That yes, she’s come back to a place where she raised her children, where she was once married, where she was once someone’s lover; but that doesn’t necessarily mean she wishes things had happened differently. There’s certainly no suggestion she wants to stay here. And too much has changed for that to be possible, anyway.

At the end, as Georgia leaves Raymond’s house, we are told

‘she knows that she would do whatever she had to do again. She would have to do it again, supposing that she had to be the person she was.’

When Georgia returns to Victoria, she is older now than she was when she lived there and was married to Ben. In this specific line, I sense her certainty, that she knows herself now in a way maybe she did not before. Her certainty that things weren’t supposed to happen differently, they couldn’t have. That someway or the other, her marriage with Ben would have ended anyway. ‘She could not but destroy,’ we’re told. As if she had no other choice.

I’ve read interpretations of this story that read it as a story about marriage first and foremost - and it’s true that there’s a lot to be said about it. Georgia’s marriage to Ben was a ‘concealment’, a ‘sham’; and then there’s Maya’s marriage to Raymond and the affair she has; at least two unhappy marriages, not to mention the fact that Miles is also married to someone else, and there’s a couple of other characters who are also married, but also having affairs too.

But I read it as a story about friendship, or what happens to friendship, more than anything else. I guess because that’s what I needed it to be. It’s not a happy story, of course, because it’s about betrayal. And hurt. Georgia doesn’t find out about Maya’s death until months after it’s happened, where as once upon a time, had life worked out differently, she might have been the first to know. And so it’s about sadness too.

But Alice Munro is never moralistic. This isn’t a story with some underlying message of forgiveness, Georgia is not racked with guilt for having never got in touch with Maya, for instance. Instead it feels like this story is just being honest, contrary to all the dishonesty that takes place. I said this story was not pessimistic, and I do still believe that in spite of how depressing it might sound. Because I don’t think it’s a story of giving up. To me it’s a story of acceptance. An acceptance of the way life turns out. Of the way sometimes it can’t always be what you want it to be.

As for me, the next time I saw that particular friend I wrote of at the beginning of this post, everything was absolutely fine, entirely normal. I realised that perhaps everything I was worried about was all in my head, which is its own story to tell.

Have a you read it? What do you think?

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Differently is published in the collection Friend of My Youth.

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