Alice Munro’s “A Real Life” (1992) — Short Story Discussion

Alice Munro is a Canadian writer who was dubbed a "master of the contemporary short story" when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. She is the recipient of many other literary accolades, including the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary honour. Much of Munro's work is set in Canada and concerns the lives of everyday people.

The British Council's directory of writers describes her work as follows: "One Alice Munro short story has the power of many novels. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is irrelevant. Every word glows. Munro is able to capture the shape and mood, the flavour of a life in 30 pages. She is wholly without cliché... Munro has talked about ‘the complexity of things, the things within things’. She teases the surface, until all that is hidden, all those tucked away pivots of a life, are revealed..."

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This is a series of occasional meetups to discuss Alice Munro's short stories (picking up from where we left off before the pandemic).

This time we will discuss "A Real Life" (1992), a story about an eccentric woman named Dorrie's reluctance to get married.

Please read the story in advance (around 30 pages). A pdf copy is available here.

Stories by Munro we've previously discussed in this group:

• The Bear Came Over the Mountain (1999)
• The Albanian Virgin (1995)
• A Wilderness Station (1992)
• Differently (1989)
• Miles City, Montana (1985)

(See Murno's bio on the Nobel Prize website for more background on the author.)