DEAR LIFE

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published fourteen collections of stories as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. In 2013 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Granta, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron.

“One of the great short story writers not just of our time but of any time.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Wise and unforgettable. Dear Life is a wondrous gift; a reminder of why Munro’s work endures.”—The Boston Globe

“Unquestionable evidence of her unfaded abilities. . . . Reading these stories will tell you something about Alice Munro’s life, but it will tell you more about Alice Munro’s mind—and, not entirely surprisingly, this proves to be even more compelling.”—The New Republic

“There is no writer quite as good at illustrating the foibles of love, the confusions and frustrations of life or the inner cruelty and treachery that can be revealed in the slightest gestures and changes of tone. . . . The stories of Dear Life violate a host of creative writing rules, but they establish yet again Munro’s psychological acuity, clear-eyed acceptance of frailties and mastery of the short story form.”—The Washington Post

“To Reach Japan”

• What are Greta’s feelings toward her husband

  and her marriage as she is leaving for Toronto? What remains unspoken

  between them?

• Discuss what Katy understands and experiences on

  this journey (see especially the description at the bottom of page 26).

  What does Katy feel about Greg, and then about Harris Bennett? Why does

  Munro end the story as she does, with Katy pulling away from her

  mother? Does the story suggest that there is an inevitable cost when a

  woman attempts to break through the limitations of her life?

• Discuss the paragraph beginning, “It would become hard to explain, later

  on in her life, just what was okay in that time and what was not” (6),

  in light of Greta’s actions. She is a poet: How troubling is the gap

  between her identities as wife and mother, and as poet and artist?

“Pride”

• What do Oneida and the narrator have in common? How

  are they very different? The narrator is embarrassed that she has taken

  care of him when he was ill, and assumes that he is “like a neuter to

  her” (146–147). Why does he misunderstand Oneida’s willingness to care

  for him, and her desire to live with him (148)?

• What does the

  sight of the baby skunks evoke, at the end of the story? What light does

  the narrator’s preface (133-34) bring to your sense of what has

  happened between him and Oneida?

“Corrie”

•  As in “Pride,” a man underestimates a woman who is attached to him:

  discuss what is different about the motivations and desires of the

  characters in the two stories.

• How surprising is it when

  Corrie realizes that Howard has been keeping the money supposedly meant

  for Lillian’s blackmail payments? How does Corrie figure this out?  How

  do you interpret the final paragraph?

“Train”

• After the removal of a tumor, Belle is in a strange

  state of mind and tells Jackson about what happened on the day her

  father stepped in front of an oncoming train (196-98).  She is relieved

  to have spoken about this memory.  What effect does this conversation

  have on Jackson? What makes Jackson decide not to return to the

  hospital, or to Belle’s house, which he stands to possibly inherit?

• Do the story of Jackson’s relationship with Ileane Bishop, and what we

  learn about his stepmother’s abuse, offer an adequate explanation for

  Jackson’s transient life? What are the human costs, in this story, of

  what Belle calls “just the mistakes of humanity” (198)?

“In Sight of the Lake”

• At what point do you understand that the

  narrator is having a dream? What strange details indicate this? What is

  dreamlike about the narrator’s efforts to find the doctor’s office?

• In what ways does the story most accurately represent the disorientation and confusion that come with aging and memory loss?

“Dolly”

• Franklin wrote a poem about his passionate affair with

  Dolly just before the war, and now, when he is eighty-three, Dolly

  turns up selling cosmetics. Is the narrator’s reaction overblown? 

• What is comical or incongruous about this story? What does it say about the intersection of aging, memory, and passion?

“The Eye”

• What aspects of the mother’s behavior are troubling to

  her daughter and make her welcome an alliance with Sadie? What is

  admirable about Sadie, especially given the time period? 

• What is strange or uncanny about the idea that Sadie, in death, might

  have moved her eyelid? The narrator thinks, “this sight fell into

  everything I knew about Sadie and somehow, as well, into whatever

  special experience was owing to myself” (269). How do you interpret this

  moment and its meaning?

“Night”

• The narrator attributes the strangeness of her thoughts

  that particular summer to a special status, “all inward,” conferred on

  her by learning that during a routine appendectomy, the doctor had

  removed a tumor “the size of a turkey’s egg” (275, 272).  She says, “I

  was not myself” (276). What do you make of the narrator’s efforts to

  explain the reasons for her state of mind and the worry that she could

  strangle her little sister (277)? 

• How does the encounter

  with her father help the narrator to deal with her fear about her

  thoughts? Why is it significant to the impact of this encounter that in

  this family, emotional troubles or worries usually go unexpressed?

“Voices”

• How is the mother’s character revealed in her

  reaction to the presence of a prostitute at the dance, as channeled

  through the daughter’s observations? Why does the narrator find the

  voices of the soldiers so intriguing and so comforting?

• What

  does the story express about the difficult relationship between mothers

  and daughters, especially regarding the mother’s supposed role as model

  and mentor in her daughter’s adolescence?

“Dear Life”

• The title of this story comes from the account the

  mother gives the narrator of hiding her, when she was an infant, from a

  strange and threatening woman who used to live in the family’s house

  (318). This and other salient memories combine to create a picture of an

  often difficult family life: the mother’s physical decline, the failure

  of the father’s fox farm and his later work in a foundry, the failure

  of the narrator to return home for her mother’s funeral.  Does this

  story seem to embrace the idea that a significant task for the writer is

  to extend understanding, imagination, and empathy into one’s own past,

  and to make amends for errors, cruelties, and misjudgments there?  See

  question fourth bullet below.

Questions about Dear Life

• What is the effect of the collection as a whole, given the order, pacing, and content of the stories? What view of life does it project?
• Compare the treatment of women by men in “Train,” “Amundsen,” “Haven,” and “Corrie.” Why do these women allow themselves to be lied to or taken advantage of? What is the dynamic that permits an uneven power relationship?
• Compare the endings of several stories. Do they end in a state of suspension or resolution? Think about how the endings invite questioning, reflection, and interpretation.
• Discuss the last four stories in light of Munro’s brief introduction of them as “not quite stories,” as “autobiographical in feeling, though not . . . entirely so in fact,” and as “the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life” (255). Should they be read as if they were fictional stories, or somehow differently? If you were to tell four important stories from your own life, what would they be?