“My ambition is to write a novel before I die.” When Alice Munro said this, in 1998, she was not at an age when we might expect to hear such an announcement: not 20 or 30, but a few years shy of 70, and already known as one of the world’s best short story writers. With seven collections behind her, Munro would go on to author six more, and in 2013 she would join Toni Morrison as one of only two North American writers of fiction to win the Nobel Prize in the last 40-plus years.
But the novel Munro was dreaming of would remain unwritten, a source of regret in spite of the fact that, according to some accounts, Munro was said to have already published one, Lives of Girls and Women, in 1971. The story of Del Jordan’s coming of age in small town Ontario in the years after World War II, Lives of Girls and Women is Munro’s second book, and her only novel—or is it?
Origin stories are rarely pretty. You can just imagine the carnage Grendel’s birth wrought on his beastly mother, or how the wolf might have had difficulty nursing Rome’s purported founders, Romulus and Remus. Lisa Taddeo’s “Animal” contains just as much as a damaged woman in her late 30s spins her own ugly, cracked but loving tale to her newborn daughter.
“The Other Black Girl” is strongest in its penetrating look at book publishing, augmented by snappy, often witty dialogue, sharply created characters and well-placed pop culture references. The hilarious — and realistic — scene in which Nella firmly but diplomatically confronts the white author’s stereotypical depiction of a young Black woman is unforgettable, as is his undiplomatic reaction.
While the objectivity of memory—and even its actual substance—is consistently brought into question in her stories, what remains clear are the emotions attached to the act of remembering and the way these emotions meaningfully link individuals or objects across time.
There was a time when reading Didion made me feel like I had swallowed something that burned—that I could taste what it might be like to make someone sick with desire—and she retains that sense of being both divisive and adored; she will remain a powerful observer of our times and someone whose style people are quick to turn into metaphor. You could read every Joan Didion book ever released, study every sentence, look for her name in the margins of other biographies and in the bylines of archived clippings, in the credits rolling past on the screen, and still, you might know nothing.