What's so great about Alice Munro?

Uh, I love "Englished" but "Norwegianed" was a lousy idea.

James Wood: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/10/alice-munro-our-chekhov.html

i've been wondering recently why munro seems so underexposed despite being so beloved. like, is it just that she writes in a relatively unpopular form (the short story)? how much does it have to do w/ her being a woman? or canadian i guess? (or am i just mistaken about her popularity?)

"or am i just mistaken about her popularity?"

this

maybe i need a more literary friend group

she definitely has fans in the u.s. (among literary types who have been reading her in the new yorker for years and her trade paperbacks are fairly ubiquitous and she always gets gushing reviews in newspapers so anyone who buys lit books based on those reviews has to know about her) and canada, but i don't know about elsewhere. my opinion is skewed though cuz i have lived in philly, marthas vineyard, and western mass for decades now and those places are filled with brainiacs who read a ton. but her rave newspaper reviews are nation-wide. i would say "college-educated New Yorker Magazine reader" would seem to be her target audience here BUT i think there is also book club crossover with her and i kinda can't believe Oprah never raved about her but maybe she did and i missed it.

also, yeah, short story collections one notch above new volumes of poetry as far as sales go probably. with some exceptions.

she is listed on oprah mag's fave women writers list:

http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/Favorite-Women-Writers/3

and she gets reviewed by francine prose in O mag:

http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Too-Much-Happiness-by-Alice-Munro-Book-Review

she is way too subtle for an oprah bookclub choice

As much as anything, I became more aware of her as each Best American Short Stories annual, from the late 80s through the 90s, featured one and sometimes two of her stories, without a break in the run.

Would it shock y'all to know that Bret Easton Ellis thinks she's overrated?

http://i39.tinypic.com/ff48q0.png

http://stcommunities.straitstimes.com/show/2013/10/18/ill-health-keeps-canadian-author-alice-munro-nobel-ceremony

"Short story writer Munro, 82, revealed in 2009 that she had undergone coronary bypass surgery and had had cancer treatment."

http://25.media.tumblr.com/aa3ee53eb18c9323f19043a1b81aab70/tumblr_mutvbot7CZ1qb4dbmo1_500.jpg

some of her stories so many of them really are like a long swim in the ocean you come out of them feeling refreshed & born anew

― polymath & psychics club (Lamp),

otm. I had a similar response reading the late story "Fiction" in one sitting this morning. Wow. She has a talent for drawing circles around circles, and when I'm afraid she's spinning away from the center she pulls the circles together and tight.

yeah maybe it was on this board where someone described her stories as kind of starting in the middle and then expanding outward like tree rings

the retail person in me wants to know more about alice in her bookstore days.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FXU1priUUAA3wHj?format=jpg

my eyes are terrible. i see james joyce.

https://shortstorymagictricks.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/munro-alice-1965.jpg

i like the peek at her shelf. i feel like i'm spying.

i didn't even see that she had died! well, i'll be reading her for as long as i live. don't know if there is more that i can say. i used to say she was my favorite living writer. now i don't know what to say! she lived long. she wrote good.

Just reread “Family Furnishings”. Not much happens. Everything happens. A genius.

"My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him"

https://archive.is/bYm7R

jeeeeeesus

Ugh. Munro has a story sequence in Runaway about a woman whose child abandons her.

She said that she had been “told too late,” she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.

fuck that is awful

the commonness of that dynamic doesn't diminish its horribleness. obvious who the real predator is but in these situations a victim who sides with the predator turns into just as much of one themselves. this sort of thing is close to my own family dynamic so unfortunately i won't be able to revisit munro's work. to hear that her daughter eventually was able to reconnect with her siblings, who reached out to her and confirmed her experience, fills me with great satisfaction.

as far as awareness about abuse goes, it does seem to be growing, and i think it's more possible than it used to be to combat it.

but in these situations a victim who sides with the predator turns into just as much of one themselves.

i should be more clear here, i'm referring specifically to alice munro in the role of an adult co-conspirator.

absolutely heartbreaking, she was failed by so many adults.

Not just Alice Munro, but also her father and stepmother who kept sending her back to the house every summer despite being told about what happened.

In the two directly autobiographical stories in "Hateship...", Munro writes about her tendency to bracket off and ignore other people's suffering -- so yeah, that tracks. Awful.

This is also the story of my grandmother. I told my wife about it and she quickly named around five other ppl in our lives who have been through this

Not having a single trusted adult to protect you - a truly horrific experience for a kid, with a lifelong impact. Idk if I can reread her work when I know this about her, and she’s one of my favorites. But this taints her work, for me.

feel exactly the same.

There was something particularly heartbreaking seeing an obviously intelligent person use the language of liberation to excuse her own callousness. I know this situation is common and eternal but "Expecting me to put my child ahead of myself is patriarchal thinking" is such a boomer flaw.

The daughter has written about this in the past. It's so horrible that Munro's reaction was to treat her daughter like "the other woman" in an affair. The daughter felt like Munro was not getting it and described the abuse in detail to her, and a few days later Munro told her, "I've decided to forgive you for what you said to me."

ouch. i was sad that nobody came to this thread when she died. so wasn't expecting this kind of revive. sad. life if sad for so many. i can totally see one of her characters not leaving someone because of something like this. she was enough of a cipher to me that i just saw her as the omnipresent creator in her stories. not someone i tried to match with her work. though i knew there were close similarities. "this person should run away" is something you could say when reading a lot of her stories. ugh. i don't even know what to say.

I knew nothing about her other than the late starts and periods of isolation.

The daughter has written about this in the past. It's so horrible that Munro's reaction was to treat her daughter like "the other woman" in an affair. The daughter felt like Munro was not getting it and described the abuse in detail to her, and a few days later Munro told her, "I've decided to forgive you for what you said to me."

― A So-Called Pulitzer price winner (President Keyes), Monday, July 8, 2024 3:46 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah this sort of thing is like... how abuse works. kind of a textbook case. i think alice herself was probably abused. that's how you get into these kinds of relationships to begin with. i mean not necessarily but i think that's often the case.

i think this particular piece, written by her daughter, is really powerful because of how it ends.

It seemed as if no one believed the truth should ever be told, that it never would be told, certainly not on a scale that matched the lie.
Until now.

there's this sense of battling one of the greatest storytellers and letting truth resound. lion roar stuff. i'm so proud of her.

ending the cycle is one of the noblest things a person can do

Recognizing it is a cycle is the first, hardest step.

the siblings seeking to understand what happened & get help to do that was such a moving coda too

yup

yeah, so many times that person just has to lose everyone, i'm proud of her siblings for coming around. that's three more people trying to end the cycle.

and it speaks to the power of the idea that you are not your parents. showing up for each other, or even the act of TRYING to is such a meaningful act of love but it takes a lot of courage

nine years old, wtf. all that "homewrecker" stuff is vile at any age, but at primary school age?!

The lineup of supposedly smart men who misunderstood Lolita is gross too: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/article-andrea-robin-skinner-reminds-us-that-monsters-lurk-within-classic/

I'm finding it darkly funny that of all the problematic/"red flag" 20th century authors regularly lambasted on social media, turns out Alice did something arguably more fucked up than any of them.

Glad Norm McDonald isn't around to see this

Read this: https://www.thecut.com/article/alice-munro-daughter-sexual-abuse-family-secrets.html