Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

"I feel like any Alice Munro story is a horrid story to boil down to an elevator pitch. It’s disorienting. I still don’t even know what the story is about, except I know that it’s about a woman who feels at home in the Alice Munro universe: she’s a writer, she’s a Canadian, she’s a mother, she’s sexually alive. She’s very connected to her past; there’s a modesty to her. The reason why I thought it was an interesting choice for books about friendship is because even though the main meat of the story is to do with our narrator and men in her life, her friend Sunny comes in and out in little blips. Each blip is very intense—say, more intense than the narrator’s experiences with men: with the husband who she left, or even with Mike, the boy who as a man she reconnects with. ‘Nettles’ reveals how essential friendship is. Sunny is the bridge; it’s through visiting Sunny later in life that our narrator happens to be reconnected with this pivotal character from her past. Munro’s description of how her and Sunny became friends very much resonated with me. It was during the time when they were both new mothers. Society expected them to be dopey and checked out, but in fact it was one of the most intense periods in their lives. They’d sit around together, discussing books, and art, and things that really meant something to them: Our pregnancies had dovetailed nicely, so that we could manage with one set of maternity clothes. In my kitchen or in hers, once a week or so, distracted by our children and sometimes reeling for lack of sleep, we stoked ourselves up on strong coffee and cigarettes and launched out on a rampage of talk—about our marriages, our fights, our personal deficiencies, our interesting and discreditable motives, our foregone ambitions. During that time of life that is supposed to be a reproductive daze, with the woman’s mind all swamped by maternal juices, we were still compelled to discuss Simone de Beauvoir and Arthur Koestler and The Cocktail Party . Our husbands were not in this frame of mind at all. When we tried to talk about such things with them they would say, “Oh, that’s just literature” or “You sound like Philosophy 101.” Just in that single stroke, our character dismisses all men. She’s talking about the way that two women can come together and stay up at all hours, and really understand each other and feel each other. Then Sunny comes back, once our narrator decides to leave her first husband. I love Munro’s description of this moment, too: Now we had both moved away from Vancouver. But Sunny had moved with her husband and her children and her furniture, in the normal way and for the usual reason—her husband had got another job. And I had moved for the newfangled reason that was approved of mightily but fleetingly and only in some special circles—leaving husband and house and all the things acquired during the marriage (except of course the children, who were to be parcelled about) in the hope of making a life that could be lived without hypocrisy or deprivation or shame. That last sentence, in itself, is a novel. We don’t know the story of what happened in her marriage. What was the hypocrisy? Where was the shame? We don’t even know how long has passed between their initial bond and this moment. It’s like magic, what Alice Munro does. It’s Sunny who our narrator seeks out. It’s through visiting Sunny that she sees what at first is a mystery to the reader. The first line of the story is: “In the summer of 1979, I walked into the kitchen of my friend Sunny’s house near Uxbridge, Ontario, and saw a man standing at the counter, making himself a ketchup sandwich.” We later find out who that man is, and he’s so significant. There’s this one line at the very end of the story that’s so—I want to make the Italian chef’s kiss but I also want to cry. In the penultimate paragraph, she says, talking about Mike in this line, “I never asked Sunny for news of him, or got any, during all the years of our dwindling friendship.” So she kills this one relationship, this lifeline to her. Alluding to the death of a friendship is very provocative to me. It’s just fascinating that this platonic, wonderful, out-of-the-blue friendship is so closely intertwined with a passionate relationship that’s also carried on throughout most of our narrator’s life. Sunny is the portal to it, and she’s also the end (or the exit door). I know. Our narrator is so brave and so alone in the world. It breaks my heart, the idea that her relationship with Sunny, the one person with whom she feels understood and the person who she feels is a safe harbor, fades away. Or control. You always wonder what the other person’s perception of what’s happening between the two of you is. I do think, especially in this triangle, there’s an element of care-taking and withholding, and striking that balance. There’s one quite needy friend at the beginning who does the unthinkable, something she’s been threatening to do for a decade that no one thought she’d actually carry out. At this point, people thought she was just going to die in her apartment because she’s so traumatized by something that happened a few years ago, and she hasn’t been able to move on. She announces at the beginning of the book, you know what, I’m going to come to New York, I’m ready to make it here, on the verge of 37. This is what’s so disruptive to the other two women, and what brings them together. Originally, they were most distant in the triangle, but they converge out of a very mixed sense of generosity and caring. They’re also feeling a little put out by this new situation, because they don’t want to have a mess to clean up after. As the story progresses, there’s a new sense of horror, watching their expectations be proven totally wrong. That came in at the end, actually. It all kind of fell together and found a perfect place. As Trump was happening around me, I could tell how the flavor in the air had changed and I thought that was fascinating. I could see that. Our sense of borders was completely unstable. In New York a sense of frenzy set in; it almost became like a new social life—the new thing to go out to was, you know, the resistance party. It was this thing that brought people together. Sadly, that’s faded away. But that’s all anyone was talking about. I think you’re right. Before, there was a sense of safety and complacency during the Obama presidency. And there was a sense of safety and complacency when it appeared clear that Hillary Clinton was going to be president. And suddenly, there was a sense that we were all delusional. Everyone who thought that what happened could never have happened. Nobody felt safe in their beliefs, and I think that led to this buzzed craziness that we’re all sharing together. It started right after the election with lots of people walking around like zombies, and hugging people who you never even used to say hello to but saw every morning. There were a lot of people brought together. And it continued. It was like one big end of times party. “When people are all on a sinking ship together, they will act in very ugly ways” There were a lot of get-togethers or fundraisers for things that maybe really weren’t going to change. We couldn’t turn back what had happened, but we were all brought out of our isolation. Maybe that is why or how on a very subliminal level the characters in the book end up acting a little out of character, and interacting with each other in a bolder way than they have been up until that point. Everything’s upside down. And there’s a parallel of that in the industry in which they all work: media, which is also dying. Crazy things are happening. Suddenly podcasts are becoming the prime real estate in that world. I think there’s a sense that when people are all on a sinking ship together, they will act in very ugly ways. Exactly!"