Read just one of Alice Munro’s luminous, enthralling short stories and you’ll want to track down all of her story collections, because to encounter her work is to remember what it was like to first fall in love with reading: to discover the joy of briefly stepping out of our familiar selves and being magically absorbed into the radiant, seductive world that an author has created. To read her is like listening to a friend tell us—in a perfectly calm, natural, confiding, and unaffected tone—the most simple and complicated, thoroughly ordinary and shockingly dramatic things that have ever happened to her and to the people she knows and loves. Her stories make us realize, with a shiver of recognition, how closely the events she’s describing resemble things that have happened to us.
Originally published in 1971, Lives of Girls and Women seems today every bit as fresh, as groundbreaking and startlingly original, as it did when it first appeared. Few books before or since have looked more bravely or more deeply—or with more humor, forgiveness, grace, and wit—at female experience, at the harsh and reassuring, particular and universal truths that women know (but rarely reveal) about themselves, about the men they love, about their friendships and rivalries with other women. No one has a better ear for the way we tell our stories, or for the fevered tone—“ribald, scornful, fanatically curious”—in which adolescent girls talk about romance and sex. No one has a sharper (or more compassionate) perspective on the embarrassment and uneasiness we feel when we see, in our parents and older relatives, the very same quirks and traits that we ourselves have inherited. And no one manages to pack so much into a single story—birth and death, happiness and heartbreak, the history of whole generations and communities—and make it look so easy.
Officially a novel, Lives of Girls and Women can just as easily be read as a series of beautifully crafted, interrelated short stories, all of which concern Del Jordan, a young girl growing up in the Canadian countryside and, later, in one of the provincial, deceptively sleepy Ontario villages where most of Munro’s fiction takes place. The early chapters center around Del’s family and community—her brother, aunts and uncles, an eccentric neighbor known as Uncle Benny, her mother’s friend Fern Dogherty, and Del’s own best friend, Naomi. Del’s even-tempered, well-liked father raises foxes on a farm outside the town of Jubilee. Her mother, a prickly, sympathetic presence whose powerful personality figures in—or hovers over—nearly every episode in the book, is a volatile mix of contradictions: agnostic, opinionated, fiercely individualistic, she can’t help worrying about what the neighbors might think. An ardent defender of the underprivileged, she considers herself superior to the poor country folk down the road.
The thread that stitches the volume together is the steady, alternately painful and exhilarating progress of Del’s education: her efforts to find out who she is and how she fits into the wider world; her struggle to fathom the mysteries of love and sex, to navigate the treacherous straits of girlhood and adolescence and to become a woman without sacrificing her individuality, her spirit, her intelligence, her bright, stubborn sense of self. Many of the chapters find Del avidly searching her surroundings for clues to the dark mysteries of adult life. In one, she watches the rocky course (and the eventual crack-up) of Uncle Benny’s marriage to a half-crazed mail order bride; in another, she accompanies her mother on her rounds, selling encyclopedias—a job that embodies all of Mrs. Jordan’s most intense ambitions and excruciating frustrations; in another section, Del attempts to settle “the question of God” by attending services at her town’s many churches—Methodist and Presbyterian, Congregationalist and Anglican—and by testing the power of prayer during a personal crisis in Household Science class; in yet another, she monitors Fern Dogherty’s romance (and initiates a perverse, furtive one of her own) with the attractive, shiftless bachelor who reads the news on the Jubilee radio station.
In later chapters, Del and her friend Naomi take their first tentative and gradually more eager steps toward the scary, enticing realm of experience they have been observing from afar. They go out drinking with older men; Naomi becomes engaged; Del ends a dutiful, cerebral relationship with her high school sweetheart (“Our bodies fell against each other not unwillingly but joylessly, like sacks of wet sand”) and begins a passionate love affair with a young man who works in the local lumberyard and heads the Baptist youth group. Meanwhile, even as she is trying to reconcile romance with independence, Del is upset by a magazine article describing a young couple looking at the moon; the boy is contemplating the immensity of the universe, while the girl is thinking that she needs to wash her hair. “It was clear to me at once that I was not thinking as the girl thought; the full moon would never as long as I lived remind me to wash my hair. . . . I wanted men to love me, and I wanted to think of the universe when I looked at the moon. I felt trapped, stranded; it seemed there had to be a choice when there couldn’t be a choice.”
It’s moments like this one—revelations of character, flashes of insight that make us stop and wonder how Alice Munro could possibly know so much about us, about precisely what we thought and felt when we were Del’s age, our first friendships and first crushes—that make her fiction so unique. Reading Lives of Girls and Women, you can almost watch its author develop and perfect the seemingly effortless and (in fact) astonishingly masterful skills she has deployed throughout her career.
Even in this early book, she is already building her fiction by adding layers of depth, of character; already shifting gracefully and naturally between past and present; already exploring the themes of community and social class, town and country, destiny and ambition, the needs of the body and the hungers of the spirit; already allowing her plots to take surprising turns so that they almost appear to be rambling, until we realize that every word, every detail, is essential, every incident changes the way we view every small and large event, and that she is always—firmly and entirely—in control. And already she is writing beautifully, powerfully, and lyrically about familiar, seemingly everyday things. Here, for example, Del remembers falling asleep, knowing that her parents were downstairs, companionably playing cards in the kitchen:
Upstairs seemed miles above them, dark and full of the noise of the wind. Up there you discovered what you never remembered down in the kitchen—that we were in a house as small and shut up as any boat is on the sea, in the middle of a tide of howling weather. They seemed to be talking, playing cards, a long way away in a tiny spot of light, irrelevantly; yet this thought of them, prosaic as a hiccup, familiar as breath, was what held me, what winked at me from the bottom of the well until I fell asleep.
In the chapter from which the book takes its name, Del’s mother reflects on her daughter’s future: “There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and woman. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. . . . But I hope you will—use your brains. Use your brains. Don’t be distracted. . . . It is self-respect I am really speaking of. Self-respect.”
Typically, Del dismisses and resists her mother’s advice—just as we were so frequently reluctant to listen to our own mothers’ good sense. And yet we, Alice Munro’s readers, know that the transformations that Mrs. Jordan predicts have already taken place. In the decades since Lives of Girls and Women was first published, our world has been greatly altered. But part of what’s so moving and exciting about Alice Munro’s work is her gift for identifying and expressing how much has stayed the same, how much will always stay the same. In her calm, unhurried, yet urgent fiction—set on farms and in small towns in Canada, in the recent or distant past—she reaches so deeply into the hearts and minds of her complex and sympathetic characters that what she is able to give us is nothing less than what is eternal and universal, unchanging and profound, not only in the lives of girls or women but in what we instinctively recognize and consciously understand as the entire human condition.