Dear Life [short story review]

Alice Munro died on the 13^th of May.  Though I had heard about her, never got myself to read her stories. But the press coverage and obituaries made me realise what an accomplished writer she was.

Alice’s last book ‘Dear Life’ a collection of 4 longish short stories. The last story in this collection is, ‘Dear Life’. It is the first story of Munro that I’ve read.

As she told The New Yorker, the four stories in “Dear Life” are “not quite stories … autobiographical in feeling, thought not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.” In fact, the story titled ‘Dear Life’ ran in The New Yorker as a memoir, not a story.

It’s a dialogue-free story. The narrator, whose name we are never told, has parents who operate a fur business. She attends a local school after her father acquires a shed in town, allowing her to enroll as a tax-paying property owner. The narrator forms a friendship with a classmate, but her mother prohibits their companionship due to rumors about the friend's mother having been a prostitute with a sexually transmitted disease.

The narrator redirects her focus to academics and develops a passion for reading, despite the societal norms that hindered most girls from completing high school. She continues to assist her mother with household chores and is regaled with stories about a cantankerous town resident named Mrs. Netterfield, whose reputation for cruelty is notorious. As the fur business faces a downturn, the narrator's mother shares eerie tales about Mrs. Netterfield sneaking up to their house at night.

This story breaks the convention of a short story being a slice of life. The narration is subtle and smooth, never flashy nor melodrama, as she narrates growing up in a small town. There is neither triumph nor victimisation.

The road is a symbol used in the start and the house at the end. Here’s the opening:

‘I lived when I was young at the end of a long road, or a road that seemed long to me.’

The rhythmic prose continues throughout, injects a couple of poems written by a Netterfield lady in a newspaper about the house the narrator used to live in. The Netterfield lady’s mother had sold the house and went to live with her daughter. The purchaser brings the narrator into the house. Thus, the house sees a daughter going away with her daughter and also sees another mother bring in a daughter.

There are a lot of threads where she tells us, but does not tell us. Did Mrs. Netterfield really come to attack or was it just a story made up or spruced up? The narrator has a lot of questions about the incident, but then comes a small turn in what is called as the Southern Ontario Gothic style (of which I know nothing about and happened to read in a research paper).

Another case in point: Parkinson’s disease is very tramautic. We see in real life that people who lose memory are dumped like rotten vegetables by friends and family. Alice mentions that her mom has Parkinson’s disease and does not elaborate about it. It’s the hallmark of a good writer that they don’t spoonfeed, giving only the necessary details enough for the reader to pick up the threads and knit their own interpretations.

Alice explores the line between reality and fiction in her family's hardships. She muses on how writers, like herself, see life through a storytelling lens. She grows up with her mom telling her stories. This is poignant nostalgia as her last story is about life and story telling.

The main themes revolve around memory, reflections on life, loss, and legacy. In the end there is acceptance and forgiveness without any guilt. The closing paragraph is:

‘I did not go home for my mother’s last illness or for her funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with. We could barely have aorded the trip, and my husband had a contempt for formal behavior, but why blame it on him? I felt the same. We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.’