Manu Joseph: Alice Munro reported from inside the heads of women

livemint.com:

Nobel prize for literature in 2013, she became the first person to receive the honour exclusively for short stories, and one of the very few laureates, I feel, who were easy to read and a delight. Her common analysis of herself as a writer was that she was a woman who was primarily interested in the lives of women and what women experienced. The result was not always compassion for women; but also something sterner, something more useful.

The narrator in her short story Friend of my Youth tells us, “…mother had grown up in a time and a place when sex was a dark undertaking for women. She knew that you could die from it. So, she honoured the decency, the prudery, the frigidity, that might protect you.

And I grew up in horror of that very protection, the dainty tyranny that seemed to me to extend to all areas of life, to enforced tea parties and white gloves and all other sorts of tinkling inanities. I favoured bad words and a breakthrough, I teased myself with the thought of a man’s recklessness and domination." She did write the male point of view sometimes. I don’t know what it is about the male characters of even great female writers, but these men make fine observations about curtains and upholstery.