Alice Munro Can Move Characters

Women Were Brought Up To Believe That Men Were The Answer. They Weren't. They Weren't Even One Of The Questions.

The Better You Know Someone, The Less Well You Often See Them (and The Less Well They Can Therefore Be Transferred Into Fiction). They May Be So Close As To Be Out Of Focus, And There Is No Operating Novelist To Dispel The Blur.

How Rarely Do Our Emotions Meet The Object They Seem To Deserve? How Hopelessly We Signal; How Dark The Sky; How Big The Waves. We Are All Lost At Sea, Washed Between Hope And Despair, Hailing Something That May Never Come To Rescue Us.

When You Are In Your Twenties, Even If You're Confused And Uncertain About Your Aims And Purposes, You Have A Strong Sense Of What Life Itself Is, And Of What You In Life Are, And Might Become. Later.. Later There Is More Uncertainty, More Overlapping, More Backtracking, More False Memories. Back Then, You Can Remember Your Short Life In Its Entirety. Later, The Memory Becomes A Thing Of Shreds And Patches.

Poets Seem To Write More Easily About Love Than Prose Writers. For A Start, They Own That Flexible ‘i’…. Then Again, Poets Seem Able To Turn Bad Love – Selfish, Shitty Love – Into Good Love Poetry. Prose Writers Lack This Power Of Admirable, Dishonest Transformation. We Can Only Turn Bad Love Into Prose About Bad Love. So We Are Envious (and Slightly Distrustful) When Poets Talk To Us Of Love.