At the International Festival of Authors in 2009, Alice Munro told audiences about her early love affair with the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, and in particular "The Little Mermaid." Reading that story’s sad ending, she posited, might have been what actually began her writing career. “I was appalled,” she told the audience. “I got up and I went out and walked round and round outside the house, making up a happy ending to 'The Little Mermaid.' She got the prince! And she didn’t have to be turned into foam on the sea.”
For those who’ve read Alice Munro’s stunning and subtle stories over the years, her yearning for a neat, happy finale might be surprising. The 81-year-old, highly acclaimed author primarily sets her deceptively quiet stories in her native Canada—landscapes dark, cold and evocative as any Andersen offered his readers—and certainly isn’t known for tying the narratives up in neat, pretty bows. Instead, Munro’s fiction edges along the same lines our own real lives walk: that thin edge between desperately wanting to make legible stories out of the randomness of our world, and the impossibility of knowing our future enough to do so.
In much of Munro’s work, that tension of the events in the characters’ lives—between what she tells us about them outright and what she implies—is crucial, and none more so than in Dear Life: Stories. Each of the tales in this book hinges around characters who aren’t exactly sure that they’re happy with their choices, aren’t 100% committed to what they say they want, and are trying to make sense (or avoiding making sense) of where their decisions are taking them. It’s also telling that at the same IFOA conference mentioned above, Munro said outright that her next work—this book—would be about sexual ambivalence. So many of the characters in these stories are especially invested in how their romantic and sexual desires affect them and others, and how they can make the stories they’ve told themselves about life match up with their actions.
