Dear Life: Stories, by Alice Munro

The women in many of Alice Munro’s stories are fleeing, in quiet and not-so-quiet ways. A woman has an affair while on a train on her way to Toronto. A young girl in a controlling family runs away with a saxophone player. A repressed woman throws a party without telling her husband. In “Gravel,” the mother of the narrator walks out on a traditional marriage into an arrangement with an actor.

She’d walked out on her silver and her china and her decorating scheme and her flower garden and even on the books in her bookcase. She would live now, not read. She’d left her clothes hanging in the closet and her high-heeled shoes in their shoe trees. Her diamond ring and her wedding ring on the dresser. Her silk nightdresses in their drawer. She meant to go around naked at least some of the time in the country, as long as the weather stayed warm.

Munro’s women flee bad marriages and unfortunate circumstances, but more than anything they seem to be fleeing an interior sense of limitation and self-chosen boundaries. The men they leave behind are rarely bad or evil, and Munro treats her fleeing women with a lightness and a sense of humor that is different from the work of her feminist predecessors, like Kate Chopin. As the narrator of “Gravel” contemplates her mother’s desire to go naked, she says, “That didn’t work out, because when she tried it Caro went and hid in her cot and even Neal said he wasn’t crazy about the idea.”