how to deal with others' pain and materialize it to represent.
It reminded me of Alice Munro's “Family Furnishings”. In that short story, the narrator writes her novel using the disaster that happened to her relatives.
Munro has repeatedly used stories from home and foregrounded reflections on what it means to use home as material – memories, people, and stories. The story that best epitomizes this is probably “Family Furnishings” (Hateship), a story about a woman who becomes a writer.
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First, the narrator seems to somehow share her fiancé’s doubts. So far, the family story has been a story that she could not stand listening to, as her mother and her aunts told it: the narrator’s feeling that her mother and her aunt’s voices were “obscene” (Hateship 110) is conveyed by a striking image that conjures up the body: “their voices were like worms slithering in my insides” (110). Alfrida, however, will tell her story and as the narrator listens to her, one sentence catches her attention: “And the minute I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head” (112). The moment is epiphanic, it is the moment when she understands how the sort of stories and real life tragedies her fiancé despises can provide her with her material, as the repetition of the pronoun “me” shows: “I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air available only to my- self” (112). “Family Furnishings” clearly suggests that the narrator has to find her own voice by claiming these stories as her material and incorporating them in her own wri- tings (Bigot “Voices” 31). The exploding lamp may have killed the cousin, but it offers the would-be writer a moment of clarity when she sees that one can become a writer by using material from home, which, as the rest of the story points out, is no easy thing: “there was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own” (“Family Furnishings” 114).
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Ultimately, the story aims to show that there can be no separation between “the classics” and tragedies in ordinary people’s lives, and demonstrates that Munro’s stories are rooted in world literature as well as in family stories.
Alice Munro: Writing for Dear Life, Corinne Bigot,
Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Vol. 37, N°2, Spring 2015
