Open Secrets

The Open Secrets

The collection takes its title from a phenomenon that Munro has always understood better than almost any other writer: the fact that in small communities, certain things are known by everyone and said by no one. The title story concerns a girl named Heather Bell who disappears during a hike with her Girl Guide troop in the 1960s. She is never found, and the community moves on — or appears to. Decades later a woman returns to town and disturbs the settled surface of what everyone agreed not to say. What happened to Heather Bell is never definitively established; what is established is the web of protection, silence, and complicity that formed around the mystery.

This is Munro’s signature territory, and Open Secrets is the collection in which she pursues it with the most historical ambition. Several stories are set in the nineteenth century — in the period of Scottish immigration to Ontario, in the world of the first generations who built the towns that later stories will take for granted. These historical stories are not nostalgic. They show the same structures of female constraint and community silence operating in an earlier register, which is to say: this is not a problem that modernity produced, and modernity has not solved it.

The women in these stories — Heather Bell’s troop leader, the woman who remembers a soldier’s letters, the Albanian bride in ‘A Real Life’ — are not victims in the simple sense. They are people who know things, who hold things, who sometimes choose silence and sometimes have it chosen for them. The distinction between choosing silence and having it imposed is one that Munro never makes easy to draw.

Carried Away

The longest story in the collection, and by the judgment of many critics the greatest single story Munro ever wrote, ‘Carried Away’ covers roughly four decades in the life of a small-town Ontario librarian named Louisa. During the First World War she receives letters from a soldier named Jack Agnew — a man she barely knew before the war — and responds to them, and a correspondence develops that is intimate without ever being quite love. Jack returns from the war and doesn’t contact her. Louisa eventually marries someone else. Then, decades later, there is an accident at the local factory.

What Munro does with this material is almost impossible to describe without reducing it. The story moves through time in a way that mimics the movement of memory — not chronologically, but by association and return, so that early scenes are recontextualized by later information, and the story’s meaning keeps shifting as the angle of view changes. The final section, set in what appears to be the present of the story’s composition, introduces an image so strange and so exactly right that to describe it would be to ruin it. It is enough to say that ‘Carried Away’ manages to contain the full arc of a life — love, missed connection, grief, accommodation, the long aftermath — in sixty pages without feeling compressed or rushed.

The technical achievement is the temporal structure: Munro has always been a writer who understands that the past is not past, that earlier events are not fixed but keep changing as later events illuminate them differently. In ‘Carried Away’ this understanding is fully operationalized, producing a story that reads differently on second reading than first — not because information is withheld, but because the meaning of what we know changes when we know more.

Munro’s Middle Period

Open Secrets (1994) sits at the center of a long arc that begins with Lives of Girls and Women (1971) and ends with Dear Life (2012). The early Munro — Dance of the Happy Shades, Lives of Girls and Women, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You — is more directly autobiographical, more rooted in the specific texture of mid-century Ontario small-town life. The later Munro — Runaway, The View from Castle Rock, Too Much Happiness — is more geographically and historically mobile, though the preoccupations remain constant.

Open Secrets represents the point at which Munro’s structural ambition became most fully realized. The temporal ellipses and the refusal to close narratives that characterize her mature style are fully present here — more so than in Runaway (2004), which is the collection most commonly recommended as an entry point, precisely because its emotional directness makes the ellipses easier to tolerate. Open Secrets rewards readers who are already comfortable with the Munro mode and want to experience it at its most technically demanding.

The 2013 Nobel Prize — awarded, memorably, to “the master of the contemporary short story” — brought Munro wider readership, but her reputation among writers and critics had been of this order for decades. Open Secrets is the collection that most fully justifies it.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — One of the finest short story collections of the twentieth century, containing ‘Carried Away’ alone would justify its existence. For readers already comfortable with Munro’s elliptical structures, this is the collection that shows those structures operating at their fullest extension.