To Alice

On reading Alice Munro, now and always

A young Alice Munro from here

Alice Munro died on Tuesday, a week before my birthday.

I didn’t know until Wednesday. That morning I had been out for a fast, not-quite-a-run, walk. I have recently been in the habit of walking without headphones on and simply being alone with my thoughts, which is quite refreshing. But for some reason, that same morning, I felt like listening to Axis again (read by Lauren Groff). I don’t know why I thought to put it on. I just did.

A few hours later, my good friend S sent me a text: ‘I wanted to message you yesterday about Alice Munro but felt it might be a bit of a jolt to have it piping up in your messages. That’s the sort of news that should come to you via open sources.’

There are many things that moved me about this text, not least that S knew that I would be jolted as she said, because she has always known how much Alice Munro’s stories have meant to me. Of course, unknowingly she did jolt me for I had not yet read the news.

‘Oh god,’ I wrote back. ‘Alice Munro died? Oh gosh, oh no.’

I felt sad for a while and quite stunned, even though I suppose it’s not that surprising when someone of a certain age passes away. When my husband came in with some paperwork I needed to fill in, he caught me by surprise.

‘Alice Munro died,’ I said. ‘You know, my favourite writer,’ I gestured to my desk, where I currently have Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage open at p113, half the page underlined and scribbles in the margin as always, and then at the poster of Julieta on my wall behind me, as if that ought to explain it all.

‘Oh!’ he said and I said, ‘It’s okay, she was 92,’ and suddenly my eyes welled up and I laughed a little, because I felt silly at my reaction.

But I truly did feel sad. I felt like her stories spoke to me, like they existed for me. It sounds over the top, I know, but I think a lot of people feel that way about her work (and imagine being that sort of writer, having that sort of affect on people!). I know that there’s often a lot of discussion about being seen or wanting to be seen in writing, from an inclusivity point of view. On paper I have absolutely nothing in common with Alice Munro’s worlds or characters. But I don’t believe you have to, in order to be moved by a story, in order for it to mean something to you, for it to feel like a part of you, for you yourself to feel changed by it. I think that’s what the best writing does and that was what Alice Munro did for me.

In practically every interview I am asked who my favourite writers are and I always say Alice Munro (and also Jhumpa Lahiri). Sometimes I am asked why. I say it’s because Alice Munro’s stories taught me to feel. They also taught me to write, though I have always read her stories as reader first, writer second, although these days it’s sometimes the other way around. Once, I remember asking an author for advice and she told me to forget short stories. ‘Short stories don’t set the world on fire,’ she said, and I felt so stupid. But then there was Alice Munro, various collections lined up on my bookshelf, and I kept going back to them. And I learnt that it was okay to be true to myself and write the short stories I wanted to write and that actually, the more short stories I might write, the taller the flame might rise.

When it comes to reading, and writing, I have old-fashioned tastes. I struggle with short stories or novels that are perhaps experimental in form or really ‘of the now’ if you understand what I mean, and I often wonder if it’s me, if I’m just not smart or interesting enough to figure out what the point is or find that moment of connection. But Alice Munro stories remind me near daily that it’s okay to tell a story in the old-fashioned way, that there’s nothing wrong about writing about something that happened to someone, and how it moved them, and changed them, and left them feeling differently to how they did at the beginning. That there’s nothing wrong in writing about ordinary lives. That it is entirely possible to write in a simple and unshowy way and yet still write beautiful prose, poetic even.

That’s not to say an Alice Munro story is ever straightforward, they never are, and they are full of hidden meanings and twists and turns, and boy, she makes you think with every line if this or that is some sort of Easter egg or clue. What I love most about her writing is the depth, the layers of time, the fluidity; the way it feels true. I am not exaggerating when I say that if I’ve spent a morning reading an Alice Munro story, even if it is one I already know, I feel like my world has changed somehow.

I didn’t know Alice Munro had been suffering from dementia for over ten years nor that she had been in a care home. I think, sadly, of The Bear Came Over The Mountain, which was actually the story I was planning to write about here for Reading Alice this month; a story about a woman, Fiona, who suffers from dementia and whose husband, Grant, has to put her in a care home. It’s a complicated story, it’s a sad story, and I have conflicting feelings towards the husband who it turns out has not always been the most devoted.

But there’s this one line, right at the start, when Fiona and Grant are young, where Fiona shouts out to Grant that she thinks if might be fun if they get married. It’s this joyous, gorgeous moment; they are on the beach on a cold bright day, wind and sand in their faces. And Alice writes:

‘He took her up on it, he shouted yes. He wanted never to be away from her. She had the spark of life.’

And, so. To the spark of life. To the stories she left us. Here’s to Alice.

ps Thank you to Tara Penry for thinking of me as a contributor to her Alice Munro readathon and virtual/ Substack memorial x