Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

CBC Books | | Posted: March 2, 2017 6:12 PM | Last Updated: May 14

A short story cycle exploring the life of one woman from childhood through the passage of womanhood

Image | BOOK COVER: Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

Lives of Girls and Women is an intensely readable, touching and very funny short story cycle that centres on Del Jordan, a young woman who journeys from the carelessness of childhood through an uneasy adolescence in search of love and sexual experience.

As Del dreams of becoming famous, suffers embarrassment about her mother, endures the humiliation of her body's insistent desires and tries desperately to fall in love, she grapples with the crises that mark the passage to womanhood.

(From Penguin Canada)

Literary legend Alice Munro died on May 13, 2024 at the age of 92. The Canadian writer is revered worldwide as a master of the short story, with 14 acclaimed collections and a Nobel Prize — the 13th woman and second Canadian, after Saul Bellows, to ever receive that honour.

Munro's work has won two Scotiabank Giller Prizes, three Governor General's Literary Awards and the Man Booker International Prize. Her first book, Dance of the Happy Shades, was released in 1968, and she continued to write stories, often contributing to The New Yorker, until retiring in 2013. In books like Lives of Girls and Women, The Love of a Good Woman and Runaway, Munro captured the inner lives of men and women in rural Canada. Her work is inspired by her own upbringing in Wingham, Ont.

From the book

Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self — my old, devious, ironic, isolated self — beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss.