Alice Munro’s women — and how they made us feel seen

Mothers appear in many of Munro’s stories. And my mother obsessively creeps into just about anything I write. Munro once said that her stories hinge on a “primordial moment… that you can’t do anything about”. Nothing can be more primordial than the relationship with your mother. Her stories seemed to me like an invitation to look deep into that well.

Dance of the Happy Shades was her first book. Perchance, I had landed on her beginnings. With each book I read, came a growing familiarity with Lake Huron. A body gets fished out from its waters; young girls snag their frocks on the brambles on its shores; secrets get buried in the interlude of winter under slabs of white ice. Men and women cheat in marriages but life happens, Alzheimer’s hits one and a tenderness gets discovered (‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’). Girls are cruel to each other and even drown one, a woman bleeds to death but not before a visceral revelation and young Doree seeks ‘Dimensions’, unable to set herself free from her husband who murdered her three children. To summarise her stories in this fashion makes me cringe, for no story of hers can be flattened. Nor can one flatten her characters: common folk in rural Canada. Her prose is unflinching as it uncovers fear, guilt as thick as slime, rage and lust, the myths celebrated, the loud silences. Free of pretence, the story does not end; it takes a hold over you.

In a class that I joined in the early days of my writing, I was apologetic that I might be copying Alice Munro. My teacher reassured me, “No one can copy her. Not even accomplished writers.” The Nobel Prize acclaiming her as a ‘master of contemporary short story’ came four months after she declared in 2013 that she wasn’t going to write anymore. A video that I played on loop on my computer after the Nobel announcement, was of her at ‘Munro’s Books’, the bookshop she had set up with her husband. I would imagine walking into the shop but couldn’t stretch this dream any further. I recognised what it feels to be dumb-struck in love and worship.

Those who mourn why Indian readers worship foreign writers while ignoring the wealth of literature in our own languages, miss a point that “primordial moments” are universal and wouldn’t be so, if the writer weren’t to concretise them in a context, its specificities. In the hands of a gifted writer, a story becomes the reader’s, offering in its pages, a recognition of one’s own lived reality, and Lake Huron can well transform into Hussainsagar. The Wingham of Munro’s stories is at once real, a character on its own, and yet a mere squiggle on a map, which could stretch itself to any spot on the atlas.

The struggles of Munro’s women are those of women caught between places, between attitudes and ways of being. She once said that her stories were “of a new kind of old woman, women who grew up under one set of rules and then found they could live with another”. One of her books is titled Who Do You Think You Are? where the character Rose is put in place (girls should stay in their place, shouldn’t they?) after successfully reciting a poem in class: “You can’t go thinking you are better than other people just because you can learn poems. Who do you think you are?” Was Munro a feminist? She didn’t care to be seen as one. “I never think about being a feminist writer,” Munro said, “but of course I wouldn’t know. I don’t see things all put together that way.”

She turned to the short stories format because there was housekeeping to do and she simply had no time. That limitation defined the contours of her craft, its rich density. The story ‘Runaway’ opens with these lines: “Carla heard the car coming before it topped the little rise in the road that around here they called a hill. It’s her, she thought. Mrs Jamieson — Sylvia — home from her holiday in Greece. From the barn door — but far enough inside that she could not readily be seen — she watched the road Mrs Jamieson would have to drive by.” Three sentences are all that Munro needs to tell the reader that Carla is an outsider, she is unsettled and in the relationship between the two women is a power differential that sets the conflict in the story.

It has been nearly two decades since I first read Munro. Even after several re-readings, I discover details that I missed earlier. What is difficult to miss is how deftly Munro unravels layers of basic human emotions and the fallibility of memory, thus giving us access to empathy. Isn’t that the very purpose of literature?

Alice Munro is no more. But one day, I hope to find myself in Victoria, go to Munro’s Books, if it is still there, and feel for myself, why a writer, a beloved author, never dies.

Mathai is a writer and bureaucrat