“I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture.”
A remembered life, as Munro reminds us in this exquisite meta-fictional story, bears as much resemblance to the truth as we allow it. From the relative sanctuary of adulthood, the narrator trawls her childhood, a terrain of innocence and naivety, to make sense of a nebulous, tragic event and its attendant guilt. She recalls playing with her older sister and the family dog, moving into a trailer beside a gravel pit with a new step-father, their mother pregnant. A wolf loiters at the edge of the narrative. Beyond this, we are uncertain what to trust, as the fragility of memory blurs into a series of constructs that ponder the nature of storytelling itself.
First published in The New Yorker, June 2011, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Dear Life, McClelland & Stewart Limited, 2012
A Personal Anthology 