I was 15 years old when I first read Alice Munro's The Lives of Girls and Women. I grew up on a diet of many famous Canadian writers, and I myself was an aspiring writer. I skimmed through the thin volume of short stories with the highest arrogance of youth. I remember thinking something like: A woman's life is not like that.
Less than 20 years later, as I shivered and closed the last page of that same book, I thought to myself: “A woman's life is exactly like this.”
Alice Munro, who died on Monday at the age of 92, saw our lives very clearly.
Why did it take me so long to understand the stories about women that Munro had to offer? My early adulthood began in the 1990s. At that time, young women were convinced that they could be anything. Wasn't gender inequality yesterday's news? Indeed, the fact that Munro was a famous writer is evidence that the complex issues she wrote about are naturally becoming a thing of the past. I understood the genius of her creative talent, but I was convinced that if a woman's life mattered so much, then the problem had already been solved.
At some point in my twenties, I began to realize that this view was completely delusional. I started reading her seriously this time, feeling a little humble. In her story, I have seen the lives of women I know. The college degree her grandmother aspired to but never achieved, the television production career her mother quit when she got married, and the disproportionate power men wield in the world. And I also saw my own self-doubt, my relationships with decent and sometimes deeply damaged men, and my struggles between my own life dreams and the conflicting demands of my own family. These things were almost indescribable. They were as difficult to characterize as air. But Alice Munro made them real, and somehow the fact that these quiet revelations took place in an area of ​​Canada that I knew made them even more real.
Then I saw her story reflected in the mirror of my patients' lives. Munro and her older women contemporaries were enthusiastic about how happy and relieved they were to have a woman as their doctor. They trusted me with the same kinds of stories that Munro naturally told me, ones that seemed fanciful or overwrought before I began to understand the lives of girls and women. I often received help from them.
I once asked a patient in his 80s about the cause of a faint knot-like scar that ran down the midline of his lower abdomen. She told me that when she had one living child, she gave birth by caesarean section. Then, almost as an afterthought, she spoke virtually of Munro. She once had a stillbirth. That day, she went to the barn to milk the cows and worked harder than she expected. The next day the baby was born dead. She carried that weight for 60 years. She always blamed herself for losing her child, and as she told me in a soft voice, “What a fool she was” .
Munro's stories often have this same type of dark development. They are full of necessary revelations: marriage and sex, birth and death, chastity and recklessness and desire. But often their central event is a personal revelation, a small but significant failure that is confessed to the reader or a third party much later in life. And perhaps most importantly, her writing encourages sympathy for the narrators, who are often unable to muster it themselves.
Perhaps her story, while evoking that compassion, opened the door to important questions that now come to mind for me. If we identify with these narrators, don't we also have a duty to feel a certain amount of compassion for ourselves?
Not all of Munro's stories were about disaster. Many of her best and most unforgettable works are about a grenade that momentarily misses its pin, or the momentary grace that saves the protagonist from catastrophe by a split second, superior intuition, or luck. It was a moment when children could have drowned and they didn't, and a moment when violence seemed to be in the making – until the storm clouds quietly passed by and left.
That's a woman's life, isn't it? Always maintain necessary vigilance against potential disasters. If disaster had not occurred, one could say that all the fuss was just neurosis. But that's an external view of the fear that forms after the danger has passed. The ever-present threat of what will happen no matter where you are, whether you cross the street or across the Atlantic Ocean. That tension determines a woman's life. Of course, it's not just women's lives, men feel it too. However, it is inseparable from women's lives, as they often care about everyone but themselves.
Munro's short story “Wood” includes this line, one of my favorites of all her works. A man named Roy was cutting down a tree when he stepped into a hole. Munro, who found himself falling and nearly breaking his leg, wrote: “What is happening to Roy now is the most ordinary and yet the most incredible thing.”
I think about that line all the time. Tragedy is a common occurrence in human history, but it only becomes incredible when it touches our hearts. Writers who want to draw us into their tragedy must take good care of us. That's what Alice Munro did. And she dissected the line between the mundane and the unbelievable as expertly as a surgeon, making it seem disconcertingly easy. She sees life as a series of moments that can shake us or betray us, full of endless rippling aftermath, the miraculous banality of days that rearrange themselves over and over again before one day we die. showed us.
That's how I felt when I learned of Munro's death. At 92 years old, it wasn't surprising. The most mundane and the most incredible. It describes what happens every day in a hospital, and preferably in just a few days of our lives. And it's also the space where some of the world's greatest writers live.
Gillian Houghton is an author and physician. Her first book, We Are All Perfectly Fine: A Memoir of Love, Medicine and Healing, has been made into a television drama. @jillianhortonMD
