Cecily's Reviews > Dear Life

Pivotal moments

I read this at the end of 2019, but am reviewing on the first day of 2020: a day for looking back and forward, for considering who and where we are, and who and where we want to be.

If I was going to write short pieces about just four incidents my life, what would I pick? The more I thought about it, the more I realised, like Munro, that it’s not the obvious headline events (graduation, marriage, parenthood, bereavement etc). Often, it’s something seemingly trivial that shapes and changes us and the direction we’re going. Mine would probably be from this list:

• Chickening out of applying for: French exchange, to be a Camp America counsellor, and for an undergraduate course at the University of Cambridge.
• My first time being drunk (plied with overly-strong drinks), aged 17, and narrowly escaping harmful consequences, thanks to my best friend.
• Leaving a teaching “career”, without finishing my probationary year, without any idea of what I wanted to do instead.
• Fighting doctors to get a compromise on feeding and treating my newborn.
• Attending the civil partnership ceremony of my father and his partner.
• Supporting my child, from a distance, through major health and mental health issues at uni (they came through, with a master’s).
• Skimming an article about the potential of book-blogging sites, way back in 2008...


Image: Me, aged 19. How different is my life now from what I expected then?

For a whole novel about such pivotal moments for a single character, see Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, which I reviewed HERE.

Fiction – and not

This book has ten understated stories, and four autobiographical pieces. The loosely connecting theme is girls and women breaking free from accumulated regret, though not all the main protagonists are female. Several stories include the loss of (or fear of losing) a child. What is unsaid is often crucial. Acts of omission lead to acts of commission. The language is plain and apparently simple, but always evocative, and firmly conjuring time (varied) and place (SE Canada). Some have a twist.

What’s strange is that the autobiographical pieces were much less engaging than the preceding fictions: less realistic and more dream-like.

The stories - no spoilers

1. To Reach Japan 2*
A train journey demonstrates the importance of being meaningfully present in one’s child’s life. I was confused by the opening page, and the big plot point in the middle was nasty (which I don't necessarily mind!) and implausible (which I do mind - there was no plausible motivation).

2. Amundsen 4*
Another train journey, another disorienting start - but in a captivating way. It’s cold: the region, the sanitorium, its chief doctor, and a visit to a house with “a suggestion of minimal but precise comfort”. I would have given 5*, but the final line (not a spoiler) didn’t ring true for the character or her story, “Nothing changes really about love”.

3. Leaving Maverley 5*
A girl from cultish sect works at small town cinema, but can’t watch or even hear the films. I thought I knew where Leah’s story was going, but without any big twists or shocks, Munro kept sidestepping the obvious. It’s all about what’s unsaid, unseen, undone.

4. Gravel 5*
“Accept everything and then tragedy disappears.”
This is about being haunted by loss, not discussing events, and choosing to forget - not an approach I recommend. Gravel, water, and a dog are significant.

5. Haven 4*
A 13-year old girl year spends a year in the mid ‘70s with her uncle and aunt, while her parents teach in Ghana. She’s initially shocked by her aunt’s deferential domestic role, “making a haven for her man”. Initially.

6. Pride 4*
Some rise up despite early setbacks, while others keep digging. The narrator is a man, who is possibly asexual - or maybe assumed to be so, by himself and others, because of his hare lip. Pride is an impediment, more for others than him. There is no ending. Nothing is said. It stops.

7. Corrie 5*
A story of blackmail, but all is not what it seems.

8. Train 5*
A soldier returns from the war, but to what and whom? He jumps off the train, walks back along the tracks, and drifts, unobtrusively, in and out of lives - his and others. He wants:
“A different block of air… emptiness” but gets:
“An immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention”.
Trains are key at a couple of other points as well. Also, this is another character who is probably asexual, which I may not have noticed had not a GR friend commented about the near invisibility of asexual characters in literature.

9. In Sight of the Lake 4* or 3*
There are wonderful descriptions of driving and walking through a small Canadian town, through the eyes of an old woman who fears losing her memory. It brought to mind Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant A Field Guide to Getting Lost (see my review HERE). But ultimately, this is an unsatisfying cliché.

10. Dolly 4* or 3*
This starts with an ageing couple considering double suicide in very pragmatic terms. Fitting the theme of things going unsaid, they don’t plan to write a note - and she is a biographer of “forgotten novelists”. But things happen. As one of them says, “Life is totally unpredictable”.

The autobiographical pieces

“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 own life.”


Image: The Munro family home in Wingham, Ontario (Source.)

The Munros lived “out of town but not really in the country... It was not like the real country, where people usually know the insides of one another’s houses and everybody had more or less the same way of making a living.”
They were neither rich nor poor. Not entirely happy, but not dysfunctional either. Her parents were from different backgrounds, with different aspirations and popularity. No wonder she grew up such an astute observer.


11. The Eye 4*
“I began to accept how largely my mother’s notions about me might differ from my own.”
Munro’s delicate and slightly awkward relationship with her mother is demonstrated when she was 5 and her brother was born, quickly followed by another baby. There’s an au pair, a wake, and a child's overactive imagination.

12. Night 3*
After being rushed to hospital with appendicitis by horses (because of a snowstorm), Munro has sleep problems and murderous thoughts, doubtless exacerbated by - you guessed - something important but unsaid. Her father reassures her, but still without telling her everything.
“The truth was told with only the slightest modification.”

13. Voices 3*
Munro honestly confronts the inaccuracy of memories, exacerbated by people deliberately turning a blind eye to unsavoury things and people. The title refers to airmen at a party, who were probably British and she remembers as seeming kind, gentle, and blessed.

14. Dear Life 2*
Ramblings combining observations of her mother’s deterioration from Parkinson’s and a possible attempted babysnatch, long ago.


Quotes

• “She carried not noticing to an extreme.”

• “Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle -
And hoping
It will reach Japan.”

• “Small untidy evergreens rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded… as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling.”

• “A dry-lipped kiss, brief and formal, set upon me with hasty authority.”

• “Her smile… seemed to shower him with delight.”

• “He nearly always gave approval, but with qualifications.”

• “Haul it [laundry] in when it was dry and smelling all fresh and congratulatory.”