At first, she tries to figure out why Dorrie is hesitant. Millicent herself has a husband and three children, but for years her husband has been “decent - mostly, after that, he left her alone.”įor all of this, it is Millicent herself who encourages Dorrie to move to Australia and marry the man who fell in love with her, or, at least, wanted to marry her, when Dorrie has cold feet. She believed always in the sweetness of affection that had eliminated sex. Millicent, who was shrewd and practical in some ways, was stubbornly sentimental in others. She meant that love had existed, kindness had created comfort, and in the poor, somewhat feckless life Dorrie and Albert lived together, loneliness had not been a threat. What did she mean? Not something shameful.

“If her brother was alive, she would never have needed to get married,” Millicent said. Here is the second paragraph where we get to know a bit about Millicent: In particular, Millicent is not comfortable with sex, so she finds ways to eliminate it from everyone’s story. Millicent has ideas about how life should be, and if life isn’t quite lining up that way, she finds a way to realign it all. I suspect the person reassuring the truthfulness in that opening paragraph is Millicent herself. Though the story begins with Dorrie Beck, our central character is an older woman named Millicent. It sounds like however “true” that love and desire to marry was, something has shadowed that truth. But that third sentence - “It was true” - that makes me question the voice that needs to find such reassurance. Even after reading the third sentence, I still think the first two sentences are true. I have no reason to disbelieve the first two sentences. Munro begins the story with an assertion of the truthfulness of some matter, but it is far from reassuring:Ī man came along and fell in love with Dorrie Beck.

Somehow this works perfectly to show us just how complicated a real life is. Wonderfully, she does it by showing us a life viewed from so many angles we simply cannot know what is real and what is false. She’s constantly questioning what life is made of, what makes a real life? So it was with great interest that I started “A Real Life,” curious just how Munro would explore these themes again. She examines the deeply buried pain that goes on in the kitchen while someone silently cleans up. She examines the lies we tell ourselves to cope. Munro’s stories constantly interrogate assumptions about what goes on in a life.

Alice munro open secrets analysis