On the cruelty of lovers – The Economist:

‘Promise me you’ll boil the water you drink. And you won’t marry a farmer,” says a character in “The Love of a Good Woman”. Instantly, the reader is in Alice Munro territory: spinsters with lingering illnesses and stifled passions, jealous married women scrubbing floors, inky veins protruding from their legs. Light falls relentlessly on the domestic: a gas stove in the kitchen fed with quarters, a dining-room table with a lace cloth on it, a ceramic swan reflected on an octagonal mirror. But there is always something savage lurking beneath the veneer of gentility: recurring themes of drowning, regret, longing, the cruelty of lovers.’

(…)

‘The daughter of a silver-fox and mink farmer, Ms Munro was brought up in rural Ontario. (“[Poverty] meant having those ugly tube lights and being proud of them,” says the narrator in “The Beggar Maid”.) As a girl, Ms Munro was told that the worst thing she could do was to “call attention to yourself” or “think you were smart”. For her, books were vessels to be drained immediately. In her stories, libraries were a ticket to another life. It was always girls who resorted to selling their blood for cash or who worked as librarians. But then those girls also won scholarships, escaping small-town Canada and its surrounding wilderness. So did she, by enrolling at the University of Western Ontario to study journalism.’

(…)

‘Famously, she wrote while her daughters napped. It was in those stories that she tried to fathom the bargains people make “for lust”, recording the cycle of excitement and despair, the bitterness of those who fear they have missed the boat. These stories condense decades of the ephemeral—mildly transgressive love affairs, neediness, impulse.’

(…)

‘She became the first Canadian woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, but was too unwell to travel to Stockholm for the ceremony. Instead, the Nobel Foundation visited her at her daughter’s home in Victoria, British Columbia, and recorded an interview.’

(…)

‘The Swedish Academy praised her ability to show “how much of the extraordinary can fit into that jam-packed emptiness called The Ordinary.” Her short stories—the opposite of provincial despite their settings—have the emotional depth of novels. She wrote about the clamour of desire, the self-deception and destruction, without ever being sentimental. Sexual attraction is omnipresent in her stories, driving people to extremes, teasing them with the possibility of happiness.’

Read the appraisal here.

Sexual attraction is just another possibility of happiness and the much of the extraordinary fits into the huge empty jar called The Ordinary. Absolutely.

Also, it’s possible to write when your child naps; actually it’s the best of two worlds.