Tag: marriage

Last night I attended a talk at a local bookshop by Professor Reingard Nischik from Universität Konstanz about the work of Alice Munro. This quote, from Munro’s first novel (Prof. Nischik called the book a “short story cycle”) is the perfect sentence from and about Munro’s fascinating literary world. So mundane and simple, yet polished and perfect:

“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.” (Alice Munro Lives of Girls and Women. (1971))

The shop was packed with interested listeners, a good sign that Munro, after the Man Booker award and now the Nobel prize, gets the attention she deserves in Germany.

What struck me about Munro’s biography is that she apparently never had the Woolfian “room of one’s own.” As housewife and mother, she only had a small desk in the dining room of her house in southwest Ontario; her second husband, a geographer, had a/the home office. Her need to carve out time and space from family life for her work is apparent from a saying Prof. Nischik quoted several times throughout the evening. All Munro wants “is to find time to work.” The arrangement seems to have worked for Munro, and many writers, particular women and others who aren’t middle/upper-class men, do not have a room of their own, and manage to create amazing work. Probably Ms. Munro, who has had considerable success in her country since the 70s, chose this arrangement. However, I personally think it’s problematic that the husband did not do more to give his obviously genius wife more time and space to write. It’s probably a generational thing – Alice Munro is the same age as my grandmothers. For many women of that generation, putting family first came quite naturally, and I admire both my grandmothers and Ms. Munro. I in no way want to look down upon women* who are “just” housewives and mothers. There’s nothing easy about that, and it often takes a lot of self-sacrifice. In addition, who knows how a different work environment would’ve changed her writing.

I just hope that if I were the husband, I’d do a large share of work with the house and kids so my literary wife doesn’t have to struggle to find time to write.