My father once told me my Achilles heel was my terrible taste in men and it would ruin my life. He wasn’t necessarily wrong. I ended up having a baby at 20 with a young man who never had a job. Before he left, he stole everything from me—my clothes, my books and my money. He left me with seven dollars. He later died of an overdose. It was quite remarkable how badly I had chosen.
We met in high school. He had a knack for writing funny poems riddled with spelling mistakes that he would pass me in class. He was always in the talent show, even though he had no particular talent in singing or acting, but he just could not resist the pull of a stage. I liked the way he smiled in his sleep. Was this enough to decide to spend my life with someone? No, but honestly, how much choice do any of us have in love?
I have been rereading Alice Munro. One of the reasons I adore Alice Munro is that her characters are also at a loss as to why they end up with their partners. They throw everything away for the most random of men they barely know. They simply pack up their lives and commit to strangers.
Munro’s characters throw everything away for the most random of men they barely know. They simply pack up their lives and commit to strangers.
Munro’s characters are always so horny. Especially if they get on a train. Whenever one of her young women gets on a train for the first time, anything perverted can happen. They get into all kinds of kinky situations!
You might be thinking, “I’ve never really thought of Alice Munro in that way. Is there that much sex in her stories?”
A lot of people have this blind spot with Munro. She is not really known as someone who wrote about the strange sexual desires that drive a woman’s actions. But it is true. The shocking and delightful sexual desires of women electrify all her work.
Am I exaggerating? In her story “Wild Swans,” a young woman who has been sheltered and contained in a small town gets on a train. No sooner is the train on its way, when an older unattractive man sits next to her, places his newspaper over her lap and begins to diddle her. She allows it to bring her to orgasm. Why? Well, she can’t exactly say:
“Curiosity. More constant, more imperious, than any lust. A lust in itself, that will make you draw back and wait, wait too long, risk almost anything, just to see what will happen. To see what will happen.”
The train runs through the writing of Alice Munro. Women can hop on it. It will take them far away from their homes. They have to get away from their towns and their families. The home is a garden they must be cast out of. Maybe the bite of the apple is the first kiss. It is something only a young girl, and not her parents, determine. It is as if in Munro, with the first sexual act with a man, any man, suddenly she is mortal. She has free will and her future begins.
No one is as easy to seduce as an Alice Munro character. You just call them up, ask for a rendezvous and they are there.
No one is as easy to seduce as an Alice Munro character. You just call them up, ask for a rendezvous and they are there. Alice Munro characters are not after love. They are after male attention. Which to them is like alcohol. The men make them feel uninhibited and allow them to make decisions they wouldn’t otherwise.
In “The Children Stay,” a young housewife joins a local production of Eurydice. She begins an affair with the director and leaves her family for him. But it is not at all the romance or love that motivates her to leave. It is the desire for this surly, untalented director, who is less handsome, less successful and less stable than her husband.
This desire cannot be rationalized. It’s that strange moment that undoes Munro’s characters. Like her characters, I don’t know if I’ve ever fallen madly in love. But I can’t count the times when I was suddenly magnetized by a man. And I was willing to turn my life upside down for them, for no good reason. In one instance, it was the way a guy picked up his bicycle and it seemed so light. It had to do with the way another was slouched in a chair. For another, it was the way he drove stick. For so many, it was just the way he looked so pleased to see me. I don’t like tattoos, but I like when tattoos peek out of shirtsleeves. Something so tiny that stands out, that seems so familiar, as though you have already seen that tattoo, as though you are already lovers.
That is what desire so often feels like. It’s more primal and mysterious. Such is the spin-the-bottle effect of desire in Alice Munro stories. The tension in the stories lies in the moment the woman’s desire will release her from her mundane life. The absurdity and beauty of Munro is how a girl can fall in love with someone in line at a grocery store, or at least one man on a train ride, and then decide to leave her life behind, like Pauline in “The Children Stay”:
“So her life was falling forwards; she was becoming one of those people who ran away. A woman who shockingly and incomprehensibly gave everything up. For love, observers would say wryly. Meaning, for sex. None of this would happen if it wasn’t for sex.”
When Munro’s women escape, they leave behind their entire homes, children and communities. By and large, Munro’s wives are an unfaithful bunch. Perhaps what is most surprising is that they don’t regret their sexual choices.
Her characters are, at heart, deeply unpredictable because of this quality. A woman’s stability is the glue that binds a household together. When Munro’s women escape, they leave behind their entire homes, children and communities. By and large, Munro’s wives are an unfaithful bunch. Perhaps what is most surprising is that they don’t regret their sexual choices.
The reason Alice Munro stories are so uplifting is that somehow the girl escapes the life that is mapped out for her by her family, or her husband. The heroine’s light is never extinguished, her wit is not dimmed. Even if her living situation is not ideal at all.
In “Axis,” a young single girl, Grace, gets interrupted losing her virginity in her bedroom, having thought her family was gone for the day. The family storms in and there is chaos. The young man leaves, while everyone is carrying on about the implications of this event. And the whole time, the girl is sitting on the bed. She is described by Munro as being “perfectly naked.”
Grace reminds me of the little white goat in “Runaway,” who leaps about the story, representing a wife’s feral nature. In Munro’s time, everybody expected a girl to settle down. Everybody expected a girl to be domesticated. What is a woman, is she a domesticated or wild animal? What is a young girl? Well to be certain, she is a wild animal. She is not quite broken. That is why everyone keeps an eye on her, trying to break her.
Once you really dive into the world of Alice Munro, you realize there is no such thing as a well-behaved young lady. Their heads and hearts are filled with a wickedness that should make you wary of drinking any tea they serve you.
But Munro’s principal characters can never be tamed. She is sometimes regarded, by those who don’t actually engage with her work, as a writer who documents the sweetness of small town life. For them, Munro will always be about young ladies who behave nicely and drink tea comfortably at home. But once you really dive into the world of Alice Munro, you realize there is no such thing as a well-behaved young lady. Their heads and hearts are filled with a wickedness that should make you wary of drinking any tea they serve you. They are mercurial, unpredictable creatures that can never be known by anyone but themselves.
Even when the love affairs of Munro’s characters blow up in their faces, they don’t regret following their desires. They don’t later regret the struggles to pay the bills themselves and the lonely nights. They don’t get punished like Anna Karenina. They get away scot-free like Marquis de Sade’s Justine.
They don’t get happiness, but they get to live out their stories, whatever they might turn out to be.
What if my daughter’s father had been responsible and sober? What if he had a career? What would he have expected from me in exchange? I would never have been able to live like a romantic poet.
My daughter and I lived in tiny apartments filled with paperback novels and crayons. And we wore secondhand clothes and doodled all night long. We slept in the same single bed. It wasn’t until she was in kindergarten that I was able to buy a mattress for myself. There was no one to tell me I couldn’t write in the evenings. There was no one to force me to cook and clean.
And I knew from an early age, that men are not the end of a woman’s journey. They are just adventures she has along the way. And having no man to depend on had led me to complete and total independence. And I had a wretched but marvellous and oh-so-fulfilling time along the way.
Heather O’Neill is the bestselling author of seven books, as well as the forthcoming The Capital of Dreams.
More Canadian Authors
Canadian Authors Tell Us What to Read This Summer
New releases and old favourites to get lost in on long, hot afternoons
Sarah Polley Lets Us In
From traumatic encounters to her red carpet rejection, the filmmaker—and now, author—shares reflections from a life in the spotlight
How Rupi Kaur Redefined Poetry for an Entire Generation
“I was never able to read books by young girls who looked like me”
