Alice Munro Had a Body
Lives of Girls and Women, "Before the Change," & a vivid description of a medical procedure (content warning!)
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One month ago, I learned about the death of Alice Munro, the Nobel-prize winning Canadian author of many short stories and one strange novel. Naturally, I wandered into the living room to tell my husband so that we could be bereft together.
I said, “Alice Munro died!”
He said, “Oh! Well, she was probably sitting in a comfortable chair eating a nice piece of fruit.”
I could have asked him what he meant. My husband is actually a great reader of Munro and other women (more about that below). But his comment felt like something I needed to ponder. So I walked away, letting the words “comfortable chair” and “nice piece of fruit” sink into my brain, where they marinated with things that people said to me after I shared one of my favorite Munro passages on Instagram.
I think some readers have come to associate Munro with a certain nice old lady gentility. In fact, Munro’s writing was earthy, lusty, sweaty, smelly, and leaky, just like the human body. The body—specifically a female body—is undeniable in Munro’s work. It’s the thing I love most about her.
Let’s pause here for a passage from Lives of Girls and Women:
Well-groomed girls frightened me to death. I didn’t like to even go near them, for fear I would be smelly. I felt there was a radical difference, between them and me, as if we were made of different substances. Their cool hands did not mottle or sweat, their hair kept its calculated shape, their underarms were never wet—they did not know what it was to have to keep their elbows pinned to their sides to hide the dark, disgraceful half-moon stains on their dresses—and never, never would they feel that little extra gush of blood, little bonus that no Kotex is going to hold, that will trickle horrifyingly down the inside of the thighs.
In case you were wondering, Lives was published in 1971, one year after Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Many readers, including me, first read Alice Munro in The New Yorker, which has published over 60 of her short stories since 1977 (including, famously, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” which Sarah Polley, another fine Canadian, made into a movie with Julie Christie called Away from Her.)
On June 1, The New Yorker Fiction Podcast featured Munro’s story “Before the Change,” which was first published in the magazine in 1998. I want to write about this story, because I think it’s a great example of Munro’s writing about women’s lives and bodies.
“Before the Change” is told through letters from an unnamed narrator to an individual she calls “R.” The narrator and R. had a relationship but are no longer together because of something the narrator calls “our fight.” The narrator was at a university with R. in Ottawa, but she has now returned to the home of her father, a doctor, in rural Ontario, where most of Munro’s fiction is set. The year is 1960, which we know because the narrator and her father watch the Kennedy-Nixon debates on TV. Our narrator used to believe that women came to see her father in the evenings for “vitamin shots.” But now that she is an adult living in his home, she learns that he provides abortions.
Importantly, Canada legalized abortion in 1969. This might be “the change” referred to in the story’s title. I prefer to interpret the title more broadly: “the change” could be the moment when the narrator decides to live on her own terms.
In Lives of Girls and Women, which is set in rural Ontario in the 1940s, the main character’s mother is a feminist who writes letters to the local newspaper advocating for birth control. She tells her daughter: “There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals.”
This is a consistent theme in Alice Munro’s work, almost an obsession. I’m talking about the question of whether a woman’s life has meaning and value apart from men, and what happens when a woman decides for herself that, yes, it does.
In “Before the Change,” our narrator recounts confronting her abortionist father:
At lunch today I finally said, ‘I think I know what’s going on here.’
His head reared up and he snorted. He really did, like an old horse.
‘You do, do you? You think you know what?
I said, ‘I’m not accusing you. I don’t disapprove.’
‘Is that so?’
‘I believe in abortion,’ I said. ‘I believe it should be legal.’
‘I don’t want you to use that word again in this house.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I am the one who says what words are used in this house.’
I don’t want you to use that word again in this house.
Munro thought of her stories as houses. She made this analogy more than once, in an essay and an introduction to one of her collections. “Everyone knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way,” she wrote. “This is the nearest I can come to explaining what a story does for me, and what I want my stories to do for other people.”
So when the father in “Before the Change” asserts that he is the one who decides “what words are said in this house,” there is a meta-narrative. He may desire to control what words are said in his fictional house, but in the house of Munro’s story, a reader will find not only the word “abortion” but the most beautifully clear and direct description of an abortion that I have ever read:
Out of the womb now came plops of wine jelly, and blood, and somewhere in there the fetus. Like the bauble in the cereal box or the prize in the popcorn. A tiny plastic doll as negligible as a fingernail. I didn’t look for it. I held my head up, away from the smell.
I debated whether to quote that passage here. I’d already quoted the part from Lives of Girls and Women about the little gush of blood that trickles down the thighs. Hadn’t I made my point?
Well, I live in Texas, where abortion is pretty much banned. And Texas women don’t fully understand what has been done to them. According to a recent survey of Texas residents assigned female at birth between the ages of 18 and 49, nearly a quarter of women believe incorrectly that the Texas abortion ban does not apply to pregnant patients facing fatal fetal diagnoses. It does. In the same survey, one-third of respondents believed that victims of rape and incest can legally get an abortion in Texas. They can’t.
We don’t talk enough about the conditions of living in a female body, which includes abortion, pregnancy, miscarriage, infertility, and menstruation. Alice Munro wrote into that silence, and I want to be like her.
Other interesting things
I poked a little fun at my husband in this post, but credit where credit is due: he recently recommended I listen to More Than You’ll Ever Know, a crime novel by Texas author Katie Gutierrez. I loved it so much, and I can’t stop talking about it! (Thanks, sweetie.)
Guess which Canadian comedian detested the “sweaty prose” of Margaret Atwood but tirelessly defended Alice Munro on Twitter? If you said Norm McDonald, you’d be right!
For a different take on “writing the body,” read Bunny by Mona Awad, a bonkers satire about toxic female friendship and the worst MFA writing workshop ever.
This week I have had so much fun in the comments section of Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette. Jeannine published my flash essay about infertility and raspberry macaroons. People in the comments wrote about fertility, pregnancy, abortion, hormone treatments, IVF, and intubation—it was a big ol’ party. It’s so nice to find a corner of the internet dedicated to “visceral writing” and community through storytelling.
· Byeeee!