Dear Life
by Alice Munro
Summary
Dear Life gathers fourteen stories, most of them set in the small town southwestern Ontario landscape Alice Munro had already spent a career returning to, and each one compresses what could be a whole novel's worth of incident into a handful of scenes. Munro's method here is to let years pass in a single paragraph, then slow down almost to a stop for one conversation or one unremarked gesture that quietly turns out to have decided everything that follows. Stories such as Amundsen, Corrie, Gravel, Haven, Leaving Maverley and Dolly move through marriages, deaths and small betrayals with the same unhurried, exact attention, never signaling in advance which detail is the one that will matter.
The collection's final four pieces, grouped by Munro herself under a separate heading, turn openly autobiographical, drawing on her own childhood in a house at the edge of town, her parents, and a family history she had circled around in fiction for years without naming as her own. Munro introduced these closing pieces with a note saying they are not quite stories, and that they are the closest things she has to say about her own life. Six of the collection's stories first appeared in The New Yorker before publication in book form; Dolly appeared first in Tin House.
Reading it means noticing how much weight Munro can put on something barely said, a sentence a character almost speaks and then does not, and it rewards a patient reader more than one looking for incident. It suits anyone drawn to fiction that treats an ordinary rural life as containing as much drama as any more eventful setting, told by a writer working, in this book more than most, right at the border between what she invented and what she actually lived.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Alice Munro the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, naming her master of the contemporary short story, making her the first Canadian to win the literature prize. Dear Life, published the previous year by McClelland and Stewart, is the collection most closely associated with the award, and its closing autobiographical pieces gave reviewers a direct look at the life behind decades of fiction that had drawn on it more obliquely.
Kate Kellaway, writing in The Guardian, called the stories concise, subtle and masterly. Ruth Scurr, in The Telegraph, read the collection as a possible farewell and noted its blurring of fact and feeling into something closer to a subversive challenge to autobiography than a memoir proper. Munro was in poor health by the time of the award and did not travel to Stockholm; her daughter, Jenny Munro, accepted the prize on her behalf at the December 2013 ceremony. Permanent secretary Peter Englund praised her prose as clean, transparent and stunningly precise.