This Alice Munro story is about the distances that open up between people in a family. The narrator, Janet, has a strained relationship with her older daughter, Nichola, who she is rarely in touch with and misses very much. Janet doesn’t seem to understand why she and Nichola are not close, but later in the story she recounts an event from Nichola’s childhood in which Janet chose to go through the motions of care but withdrew love in order to protect herself. This feels like a very human, self-preserving thing to do, but it has disastrous long-term consequences. This is a deeply affecting story — made even more so by the fact it feels impossible to read any work by Alice Munro and not acknowledge the fact she ignored the abuse of her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner for years.
First published in The New Yorker in May 1978 and available online for subscribers to read here; collected in The Moons of Jupiter, Macmillan, 1982; also in Selected Stories, 1996, Vintage Munro, 2004, and Carried Away, 2006
A Personal Anthology 