Yesterday I picked up Alice Munro’s latest novel Dear Life.
This summer I reread Lives of Girls and Women and remembered why I love Munro’s writing so very much. She is one of the very few authors I will re-read. The other is Anne Tyler. What both these women have in common is their ability to tell stories, richly, about both the emptiness and the abundance of ordinary life. Their stories have been companions to me along the way.
When they release their work to the world, I am one of the people who catch it.
“We read to know we are not alone,” said C.S. Lewis, and that is what great writing does for us. In fact, I urged my sister to buy Dear Life in an airport book store this week, so that we could read it at the same time, and that we would both knew we weren’t alone while we were doing it.