I bought a book by Alice Munro – “Selected Stories”. In it there is a series of four stories, spanning pages 117-208 in which the main character is Rose, the store-keeper’s daughter from Hanratty, Ontario. By the end, she is a character actor in a sucessful TV series, but that has very little to do with the stories. Along the way we learn that Rose “had a considerable longing to be somebody’s object. Pounded, pleasured, reduced, exhausted.” – ooh girl you’re hot! – and Alice explores with her usual uncommon insight the progress of Rose’s courtship and marriage to a rich fella, which ends in divorce. This is followed by an incredible section on the obsessiveness of love:
‘She was so delighted she cried out, “Oh, Simon, you idiot, you’re the man for my life!” Such was the privledge, the widespread sunlight of the moment, that she did not reflect that saying this might be unwise.
And later, when the lady from the store visited when she was expecting Simon:
‘The mistake was in buying the wine, she thought, and the sheets and the cheese and the cherries. Preperations court disaster. She hadn’t realized till she opened the door and the commotion of her heart turned from merriment to dismay, the sound of a tower full of bells turned comically (but not for Rose) into a rusty foghorn.
Also in one of the stories she uses the sentence “If you think… you’ve got another think coming.” which I always thought was “another thing coming” but it make a lot more sense her way.
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