Boss Books for Boss Moms
DEAR LIFE by Alice Munro
I don’t know about you ladies, but the end-of-the-school-year madness is in full effect in my house. I’m not exactly sure how many school days we have left. If you count half days, full days, award ceremonies, spring concerts, class parties, book returns, and art portfolio collections it feels like there are approximately 631 school days until summer break. But in reality, I will blink and the vast chasm of school-less weeks will appear before me.
I can’t remember what month it is, let alone keep track of a complicated plot in a riveting book. So instead of re-reading the first chapter of the next novel in my TBR stack for the twelfth time, I have selected for us a fabulous collection of short stories. I love short story collections. I like to bounce around and read whichever story title grabs me at the moment. Or, if I’m really short on energy but need to read SOMETHING to help my brain unwind before I turn out the light, I’ll peruse the table of contents and choose the shortest story in the line up. That way, I can disappear into another world, another life for a quick few minutes, but I avoid the danger of the cliffhanger chapter sucking me later and later into the night. When the story is over, it’s easy to close the book and drift off to sleep.
Alice Munro’s 2012 collection will spirit you away into the lives of ordinary people who find the predictability they’ve come to rely upon stripped away in an unexpected moment. “Alice Munro’s peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken. A poet, finding herself in alien territory at her first literary party is rescued by a seasoned newspaper columnist and is soon hurtling across the continent, young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train before his stop and onto the farm of another woman, beginning a life on the move. A wealthy young woman having an affair with the married lawyer hired by her father to handle his estate comes up with a surprising way to deal with the blackmailer who finds them out.”
No matter which of the fourteen stories you choose to read, you can be assured that a thoroughly engaging world will unfold in front of you. If you enjoyed reading Elizabeth Strout’s work, I can promise you that Alice Munro will charm you endlessly. Her prose feels smooth, otherworldly, and eerily peaceful. Her ability to make the lives of regular people utterly compelling brightens something inside me. There are no vampires, laser beams, or explosions in DEAR LIFE. Just the beauty and pain we all face in the world, but elevated to the height of truly stunning literature.
So do yourself a favor and scoop up a copy. Like me, you may be pulled in fifty different directions right now. You might have to come up with the end of year craft/snack for your kindergartener’s class. Or maybe you’re desperately seeking summer camps that still have available space. (Lord knows you can’t be expected to entertain your little gremlins all summer AND hold down a job…not to mention your sanity.) But you deserve a quiet minute with a good book. You deserve perfectly crafted stories that let you stare wide-eyed into a world and a life you don’t inhabit. You deserve some time spent with Alice Munro. This one’s for you, moms.
