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madeleinegeorge 's review for:
Lives of Girls and Women
by Alice Munro
A glorious, mid-century, post-Barbie read. Alice Munro is singular. Slow and meandering, Del evokes deep sympathy, rage, compassion, and envy all at once. A beautiful-- and yet not punishing-- account of a child's bewilderment and outrage as she realizes her own girlhood, her inevitable womanhood, with all the horror and beauty and ruin and loneliness it all entails.
Essentials:
"Madeleine herself was like something he might have made up. We remembered her like a story, and having nothing else to give we gave her our strange, belated, heartless applause. 'Madeleine! That madwoman!'"
"I felt it was not so different from all the other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed being female made you damageable, that a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection were called for, whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didn't want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I decided to do the same."
"She was a woman I would recognize now [...] as one of those heavy, cautiously moving, wrecked survivors of the female life, with stories to tell."
"To be made of flesh was humiliation."
"Stories of the past could go like this, round and round and round down to death; I expected it."
"This was what I expected sexual communication to be -- a flash of insanity, a dreamlike, ruthless, contemptuous breakthrough in a world of decent appearances. [...] Was this what desire was? Wish to know, fear to know, amounting to anguish?"
"We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and fight and try to kill each other, various ways, then love some more."
"Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes on its own, its natural and callous importance."
"The future could be furnished without love. [...] Now, at last without fantasies or self-deception, cut off from the mistakes and confusion of the past, grave and simple, carrying a small suitcase, getting on a bus, like girls in movies leaving home, continents, lovers-- I supposed I would get started on my real life."
"Such questions persist, in spite of novels. It is a shock, when you have dealt so cunningly, powerfully, with reality, to come back and find it still there."
Essentials:
"Madeleine herself was like something he might have made up. We remembered her like a story, and having nothing else to give we gave her our strange, belated, heartless applause. 'Madeleine! That madwoman!'"
"I felt it was not so different from all the other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed being female made you damageable, that a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection were called for, whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didn't want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I decided to do the same."
"She was a woman I would recognize now [...] as one of those heavy, cautiously moving, wrecked survivors of the female life, with stories to tell."
"To be made of flesh was humiliation."
"Stories of the past could go like this, round and round and round down to death; I expected it."
"This was what I expected sexual communication to be -- a flash of insanity, a dreamlike, ruthless, contemptuous breakthrough in a world of decent appearances. [...] Was this what desire was? Wish to know, fear to know, amounting to anguish?"
"We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and fight and try to kill each other, various ways, then love some more."
"Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes on its own, its natural and callous importance."
"The future could be furnished without love. [...] Now, at last without fantasies or self-deception, cut off from the mistakes and confusion of the past, grave and simple, carrying a small suitcase, getting on a bus, like girls in movies leaving home, continents, lovers-- I supposed I would get started on my real life."
"Such questions persist, in spite of novels. It is a shock, when you have dealt so cunningly, powerfully, with reality, to come back and find it still there."