Dear Life

The Stories and the Final Four

The collection opens with ten stories that are recognizably, unmistakably Munro—women in Ontario towns and cities navigating the aftermath of choices made or not made, the long tail of past events reaching into the present, time folding back on itself in the way that is Munro’s formal signature. Several of the opening stories—“Amundsen,” “Gravel,” “Train”—rank among the best work of her final decade. “Amundsen” in particular, about a young woman who becomes involved with a remote doctor in a tuberculosis sanatorium, has an ending that arrives with the suddenness and completeness of a door swinging shut.

The title story, “Dear Life,” closes the fiction section of the collection and gives the book its emotional keynote. A woman in her eighties, reviewing a moment from her girlhood in which she almost wandered into danger—saved by a neighbor who never spoke of it afterward—contemplates the chain of near-misses and chances that constitute a life. The ending image is of things “we can’t get over,” events we cannot resolve or integrate, that we simply carry. It is a characteristically Munro conclusion: not a revelation but a recognition, something known rather than discovered, true rather than dramatic.

The final four pieces—which Munro titles “Finale” and specifically identifies as “not quite stories”—are the collection’s center of gravity even though they are the last things in it. They have a different quality from the fiction: less constructed, closer to the surface of memory, with a directness that Munro’s stories typically achieve only obliquely. They are about specific people and specific places she has carried her whole life, and they read like the thing beneath the fiction that the fiction has been circling around for fifty years.

Mother and Daughter

The autobiographical pieces return repeatedly to Munro’s mother—a woman who developed Parkinson’s disease and then dementia, who was difficult and perhaps somewhat frightening to her daughter, who had ambitions of her own that Ontario in the 1940s and 1950s did not accommodate. The relationship is the central drama of Munro’s entire body of work, present in one form or another from Lives of Girls and Women through Runaway, and here, in the final pages of the final collection, she addresses it as directly as she ever has.

What she reveals is not a single thing but a texture of feeling: guilt, love, resentment, and something close to awe at her mother’s refusal to be reduced by circumstances. One of the pieces describes a moment when, as a child, Munro was sent away from her mother’s sickbed and did not find a way to go back; she did not see her mother again before she died. She says, in the final lines of the piece, that she never made it back to say what should have been said, and that she has “spent her life” not getting over this. This is the rawest statement in the collection, and it gives the title its full weight: dear life, the life that holds these unresolved things.

The autobiographical pieces also clarify something about Munro’s fiction that attentive readers will already have sensed. The isolation of small-town Ontario, the particular quality of female experience in a mid-twentieth century world of limited choices and enforced domesticity, the way daughters are shaped and sometimes warped by their mothers’ frustrated ambitions—these are not simply observed; they are lived. The fiction is made of autobiography transformed, and here, in the “Finale,” Munro shows you the transformation in reverse, letting you see the raw material that fifty years of craft had worked into stories.

Munro’s Nobel and Retirement

The Nobel Prize in Literature was announced in October 2013, within months of Dear Life’s publication. Munro was the first Canadian to receive it, and the announcement—characterizing her as “a master of the contemporary short story”—confirmed what a long tradition of prizes, from the Man Booker International to the National Book Critics Circle, had been saying across a career of more than fifty years. Munro had already announced, in a published interview, that Dear Life was likely to be her last book. The Nobel announcement came to a writer who had already said goodbye.

The retirement and the Nobel together gave Dear Life a retrospective weight that is unusual for a last collection. It was read not only as a set of new stories but as a final statement, and it has the quality of a final statement: formally controlled, emotionally unguarded in the autobiographical pieces, and oriented toward completion rather than toward the next thing. Whether Munro intended this or whether it was partly the projection of readers who knew it was her last book is impossible to separate; the effect is the same either way.

For newcomers to Munro, the reading order question is real. Runaway (2004) is probably the best single-volume introduction: the stories are more narratively driven than Dear Life, the style is at its most polished, and the emotional range is wide. Lives of Girls and Women (1971), which is technically a novel but reads as linked stories, is the essential early work and the best entry point to her autobiographical material. Dear Life belongs last—as she intended—as the book that illuminates everything that came before it.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Munro’s farewell collection is one of the most quietly devastating books in contemporary fiction: the fiction is as brilliant as ever, and the four autobiographical closing pieces are unlike anything else she wrote—closer to the bone, shorter, and finally unevadable.