“Dear Life”
is the titular story of Alice Munro’s 2012 collection. Actually, it is not a story so much as a
memoir. It first appeared in The New Yorker in the September 19,
2011, issue as a “Personal History” with the subtitle “A childhood visitation.” You can read it at:(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/19/dear-life).
In Dear Life, the piece is the last entry,
one of the four prefaced with the following short note: “The final four works in this book are not
quite stories. They form a separate
unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely
so in fact. I believe they are the first
and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my life” (255). The four pieces give snapshots of the
narrator’s childhood in a small Canadian town and evoke a girl’s coming of age
— her efforts to articulate an identity of her own.
As was
noted in The New York Times, “These ‘not
quite stories’ do not force their contents into tidy shapes, like some of the
“real” stories in this volume; instead they have a flexible, organic shape,
opening out to encompass Ms. Munro’s unsentimental thoughts on life and art and
storytelling” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/books/dear-life-stories-by-alice-munro.html?_r=0).
In regard
to Munro’s thoughts about life and fiction, it is interesting that the “Dear
Life” in the short story collection omits the last paragraph of The New Yorker’s version: “When my mother was dying, she got out of the
hospital somehow, at night, and wandered around town until someone who didn’t
know her at all spotted her and took her in. If this were fiction, as I said,
it would be too much, but it is true” (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/19/dear-life).
Truth is stranger than fiction?
Earlier in
the piece Munro makes another statement about life versus fiction: “Roly Grain, his name was, and he does not
have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name,
because this is not a story, only life” (307).
A reviewer in The Guardian
noted, “One is stopped short by "only life" with its implication that
fiction can be – and do – more. Roly
Grain reminds us how Munro's short stories work. She has a gift for introducing characters who
seem walk-on parts but who redirect and transform narrative. . . . If Roly
Grain had not been inconveniently real, she would have handed him a story and
let him run with it” (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/29/alice-munro-dear-life-review).
When asked
about how she came to choose the title “Dear Life,” Munro said, “Those words
are very wonderful to me because I heard them when I was a child, and they had
all kinds of meaning. ‘Oh, for dear life!’ would just mean that you were kind
of overwhelmed with all that had been required of you. I liked the contrast between that and the
words ‘dear life,’ which are maybe a joyful resignation, but when you say
‘dear’—the word—it doesn’t bring up sadness. It brings up something precious” (http://www.vqronline.org/vqr-portfolio/interview-alice-munro). She seems to view her childhood experiences
as precious; certainly her recollections of life in southwestern Ontario were
crucial to her writing.
Now a young
Canadian composer, Zosha Di Castri, has set “Dear Life” to music. The concert entitled “Echoes of Childhood”
will premiere at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre later this week (http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/09/young-canadian-composer-sets-alice-munros-dear-life-to-music.html).
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