My first ever posting to the world is a personal one. Recently I had the chance to visit with one of my favorite writers, Alice Munro. I wish I could say we sat down to cocktails, then dinner, and then shared a warm apple crisp—I’d even let her have the last bite—but it was not a one-on-one meeting at all. My friends and my editor from the Web site where I work, and a few hundred other people filled the auditorium at the New Yorker Festival event where she was speaking. Thanks to the sheer foresight, and only one desperate phone call from me, my friend Rachel nabbed seats for all four of us, just a few steps away from the stage. After rousing applause, her editor Deborah Treisman introduced
Alice and we sat there quiet as children at a birthday party, waiting for the magic show to begin. I don’t think anyone was disappointed.
Let me preface this story by saying, I have an inside relationship with Alice Munro, though she would not know me from Eve. Until the day of the festival, we only ever spoke on the phone. When I worked in book publishing, I worked for Alice’s literary agent, and as the person who opened all of my boss’s mail, I saw and read her stories first, before anyone else in the entire world (or at least in New York). One day, I must have been giddy from caffeine or delirious from the summer heat, when she called because I worked up the nerve to speak, and we had our first real conversation. She had written a story “Child’s Play” which is essentially a very dark story that exposed the feelings, the impulses, and the unpolished truth as children see it, without the urge to be politically correct or sensitive to others’ troubles. I told her how moved I was and then prattled on about my own childhood memories of a girl I grew up with who had been burned in a fire. I told her how meanly she was treated by the other girls and sometimes by me. I think she listened, but she did not give in to the impulse to explain herself or her story, to share what was true and what wasn’t. The story stood on its own. She had written it for herself and no one else. What readers took from it wasn’t the point. I honestly can’t remember what it was she said in response to my story. She was kind, gracious even, but nothing more was discussed and I passed the phone onto my boss. I was pleased, though a little embarrassed.
A few weeks later, I was on vacation driving with my cousin to Missouri, where she was moving. I was reading her the same story, “Child’s Play,” aloud in the car, when I got a phone call. It was work. I smiled. They must need my help, I thought. No. No. They didn’t. I had, in fact, run off with the original copy of “Child’s Play” and one of the pages was missing from the photocopy. Rats! Now that is embarrassing. Inside of fifteen minutes, we had stopped at a hotel, much nicer than the motel we would stay at later that night, and had faxed the single page back to New York. Imagine, if we had lived when Alice had first started getting published, I might have had to dictate the story through the phone or sent the story through the mail. By then it would have been too late to get it to the New Yorker. This thought seemed like something Alice, who is always skipping back and forth in time through her stories, might ponder and even though it was dreadful, I felt a little less shameful about the whole incident. We got in the car and I finished reading the story to my cousin.
Back in the auditorium, after Alice told us that as a woman choosing college wasn't a feminist gesture for her, it was simply her way of hiding from the world. At at a time when women were told that they should spend any free moment they had knitting, (Sundays were the exception) Alice needed a place to hide away to read and to write. After an hour’s worth of insights mined by Alice’s editor, the audience had a chance to ask their own questions.
I sat there trying to either resign myself to my shyness and live with it or simply stand up. Suddenly, I found I had pushed past the people in my row, rather brusquely, and was standing in line behind the microphone with only two people in front of me. I heard the warbling of voices and the shuffling of paper. I could see that those who didn’t like readings or thought that there was something more important than listening to Alice speak were getting antsy. My heart was thumping, like the actual Disney rabbit himself were inside my chest. And then I found that the man and the woman in front of me had somehow disappeared. I had not heard a word they said. If either one had already asked my question, I would not have known it and I thought of the look of the baffled stares and the jaws I might have been about to drop if I stumbled into that faux pas. Just then Alice’s eyes were trained on me and the room was quiet. I did not mention our phone conversation. I did not tell her I’d read nearly every story she’d ever written. I did not want to bore her. Instead I asked her about the subtlety of her work. If you’ve ever read her stories, you’d know she crafts them with such a soft touch that often you’re not sure if you believe what you’ve read. Sometimes the last paragraph holds an observation that seems unrelated, until you realize that it changes the entire meaning of the story. I did not get my question where I wanted it, so I tried again. She responded and I followed up. Actually it’s the ending of your stories that I want to know about, I tried to say. I was thinking of one of my favorite stories, “Apples to Oranges,” where, Alice never explicitly shows the reader what happens at the ending, whether the protagonist ended her affair or her lover rejected her. With no clear answer the reader is forced to rely on her (and most of her readers are women) instincts. I didn’t include this example as part of my question because a) Alice said after her work is published she never re-reads her stories and b) it was a little too scandalous a topic for me to broach in front of such a large audience, when I was focusing on simply getting my words out without stuttering too much.
Essentially, what I wanted to know was how she managed to balance writing so much of the story in a way that readers were compelled to use their intuition to make sense of what had happened. How did she know if the reader actually got it? How did she balance the actual telling with the "making you believe" and do it in such an understated way. And here is what she said: Endings are the hardest. She said she writes and re-writes her stories and she always worries that they won’t make sense, but she doesn’t want to tell too much. For a moment, I'm worried I may have insulted her. I worry that it sounds like I don't understand her writing and I want to shout, “No, no. Don't explain too much. That would be horrible!!! It would kill everything.” But, I realize I don't need to. She knows this. At least in my view, Alice never does overtell a story. Ultimately, Alice Munro answered my question with what might have seemed like a cop-out but wasn’t. I can’t quote her exactly, but to paraphrase she said: It’s a feeling. When you read the ending you should feel something. Something specific and the reader should feel it too. I am nodding my head madly like a live and fully animated bobblehead. And that’s when you know you’ve gotten it right.
To read more about Alice’s interview see a review of the event from the New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/festival/2008/10/things-you-may.html
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