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No One Wrote About Sex Like Alice Munro


In Munro’s stories, women blow it all on desire.

“She had thought he was older than she was,” writes Munro, “at least as old as Brian — who was thirty, though people were apt to say he didn’t act it — but as soon as he started talking to her, in this offhand, dismissive way, never quite meeting her eyes, she suspected that he was younger than he’d like to appear. In the manner of a lot of women artists in her generation and older, she only really emerged publicly once her children were teenagers, when she was 37: Her first collection, 1968’s Dance of the Happy Shades, included 15 years of stories. In “Dulse,” protagonist Lydia (a Munro divorcée) shares first impressions of a boyfriend’s apartment: “No attempt had been made to arrange things to make a setting; nothing was in relation to anything else.

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