By Scott Graber
It is Wednesday, and it is cold. This morning I’m in my linoleum-tiled kitchen looking out on a sun-streaked yard wondering whether I’ll get into the yard.
“Getting into the yard” is mostly raking-up leaves; bringing in bags of Miracle Grow; and pulling weeds from a triangular-shaped patch of ivy.
I don’t do any grafting or attempt to raise bees.
When I actually get into the raking and pulling part my mind wanders — in this case to Alice Munro and a piece published in the New Yorker (December 30, 2024-January 6, 2025).
Alice Munro, who died in May 2024, was a short story novelist who wrote about women — especially their vulnerabilities as relates to men. Titles like “The Lives of Girls and Women,” “Vandals” and “Labor Day Dinner” were a kind of emotional spectroscope where women could find meaning, and some comfort, in their relationships with men or with their own children.
The novelist married James Munro in 1951, and they had three children, the youngest being Andrea. In the summer of 1976 her second husband — Gerry Fremlin — molested his stepdaughter, Andrea.
And for years Munro hid that fact and continued to live with this man.
In 2013 Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature as well as the praise, “You, dear Alice Munro, like few others, have come close to solving the greatest mystery of them all; the human heart and its caprices …”
Notwithstanding the fact that Munro would not divorce Fremlin after the sexual episodes involving her daughter, she did write fiction that was similar to her hard-to-fathom, never-reconciled situation.
In the world of writing there are two constellations that exist side by side — fiction and non-fiction. It is my observation, and this is entirely anecdotal, that men prefer “true life” adventure, biography and history — especially war-related history.
Women prefer situational fiction that explores marriage, sibling relationships and especially relationships between mothers and children. Many women want an emotional crisis where the author inhabits the mind and the memories of the novel’s characters. And in every novel, these thoughts actually become the story and any “action” is secondary to these thoughts.
In the case of Alice Munro, she seems to have been working on these thoughts — running through the minds of her characters — almost every waking moment of her long life.
“Jenny (her daughter) remembers that ‘Alice’s lips would be moving as she moved through the lines of the story, ‘her writing was more real than our lives and, I think, our existence.’”
I have, for many years, looked upon fiction as entertainment — and also for instruction — standing back and noting how individual characters think through their strange, uneven, sometimes shocking circumstances. In one sense, good fiction is similar to a self-help guide — written by a psychologist — that instructs the reader on how to cope with emotional disasters by watching others founder and flop and then find shelter in single-malt scotch or Sertraline. Somehow that $29.50 guide seems a better deal than therapy.
Pat Conroy, like Alice Munro, wrote about complex relationships with a certain spectral insight. It was like these two writers had special goggles giving them “sight” invisible to others.
Some years ago, Pat published a biography on which I did a little bit of editing. “Exaggerated Life” was dictated to Katherine Clark with the singular instruction (from Pat) that nothing was “off the record.”
Pat did not minimize the tragedies — Pat’s 2nd marriage and his subsequent years-long estrangement from his daughter, Susannah. Nor did he skip over the creature that lived within.
“Long ago I told myself I would kill myself if I found I was like my father in any way. Of course you know how nature answers you back with that one. One of God’s great cruelties is to make you exactly like the parent you like the least. When something snaps in me, Santini can bloom in my soul and come alive. …”
“The novelist Mona Simpson said that after the prize (Munro’s Nobel Prize) was announced every female fiction writer she knew called her, some in tears, ‘We had won something, too,’ Simpson said in a speech, ‘because of the generosity, the frank respect for the smallest and largest aspects of the female experience that she bequeathed to us in all her stories …”
Munro never gave up her biggest experience; but that should not stop one from wandering — amazed and intrigued — through Munro’s vast and remarkably instructive canon.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
