What you should know about me? I never really fancied being the main character in those books or movies I'm into. But Sometimes, it's like my friends just walk right out of those stories and onto the scene of my life.
I can say that my new favorite author is Alice Munro (apparently, I've got a soft spot for Canadian female writers!:)) and obviously I “found” one of my best friends in her novel (maybe it’s my super power: spotting friends in fictional realms while struggling to locate myself even in the real world ).
My first book of her short stories was “Friend of My Youth”, I read it and immediately fell in love:
In this book I loved that her male characters are like side dishes, a simple adornment of the table: “We never had a word to say” and her female characters can exist without anyone but themselves:
Women who don’t love and leave.
Women who love and leave cause they also love themselves.
I love how Alice can speak about dreadful relationships in this incredibly casual manner, as if these kinds of things unfold every day. And let's be real, they kind of do, don't they? For example:
Every single day, we come across this whole mother-daughter saga, It's like this epic tale where the daughter thinks that other power can easily capture and choke her, where she keeps herself sharp-tongued and cynical in order to deal with the fog of mother’s remarks and statements, where mother can’t find any comfort in alienated daughter and where nothing can stop them from loving each other:
“What did you hate the most about your mother? Was a game that Eve would play with her friends” (“Save the Reaper”).
Also quite often we come across love where one won’t put up with anything less than perfection and other will love them like a human person- It's like this crazy dance of expectations and acceptance.
Before starting reading her stories you should be aware that they are full of questions:
Questions which make us think, questions we don't want to know answers of, questions we would never ask, questions which doesn't need an answer:
"How could movies exist anymore in the world?"
("My favorite movie- as you ought to know and if I could have thought of it when the nurse asked me- is "Wild strawberries". But you thought differently. You said that we had to find a doctor. A doctor who would give me an abortion." ("Before the Change")
who is a loser, a sister who was never chosen by loved one or a sister who let other people fix her up, "he let herself be married, she was never wild from that day on”?!
Is Turning Away From Sex admirable or evil?! ("Friend of My Youth")
"Would you rather be a nurse or the subject of scandal?"
Why are we angry at our parents? Cause we hate the fact that they were unhappy for all these time and didn’t do anything to change it?! or because they decided to be happy and "forgot" about us?!
"HER children have grown up. They don’t hate her. For going away or staying away. They don’t forgive her, either. Perhaps they wouldn’t have forgiven her anyway, but it would have been for something different."
She has characters you never want to meet but at the same time you don't want to forget about them.
Characters like Maria's mother from "five points": "She was scared of the English language, but she brought Maria into court".
or like a Young Man from "before the change" who somebody who could not stand the thought of someone laughing at him, who would cave in before a bunch of professors’ wives."
Women Characters (mostly women) for whom destruction is the only choice (It's dreadful and at the same time as simple as it is): "It was what Anna Karenina had done and what Madam Bovary wanted to do"; "It was adultery taken one step further" and " to go back would be like trying a sock over her head".
Finding yourself in her characters can be a bit frightening sometimes, I found myself in Karin from "Pictures of The Ice": “He said he was giving her a week to decide. No more drinking, no more smoking, Christ as her Saviour. One week. Karin said don’t bother with the week. After Brent was gone, she quit smoking, she almost quit drinking, she also quit going to Austin’s church.”
And Also her stories are full of Discoveries.. No, love, you don't discover America or a treasure; you discover a hurtful truth (which in the end is Much better than any treasure, but only in the end, for now it just hurts):
you discover that being a female means that we must choose survival over victory:
"To me it seems that it was only then that I became female. I know that the matter was decided long before I was born and was plain to everybody else since the beginning of my life, but I believe that it was only at the moment when I decided to come back, when I gave up the fight against my mother (which must have been a fight for something like her total surrender) and when in fact I chose survival over victory (death would have been victory), that I took on my female nature";
you discover that life is unbearable without self-respect and that "you don’t realize how much you’ve lost of your self-respect and how much you miss it till you start getting it back";
And in the end you discover a "human being can be about as much use as a stopped clock" if they don't hold you, while you need to be held, if they run from or even if they stay, when they don't want to. .
It hurts, doesn't it?!
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