“I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‘call attention to yourself,’ or ‘think you were smart,’ ” Alice Munro, who died on Monday, at age ninety-two, once said. She rebelled against this edict, of course, but it stayed with her. There was, in her writing, often a very deliberate, confident moment of calling attention to herself—an attempt to startle, to pierce with words and meaning—and then a more modest retreat. Fireworks, followed by starlight. That seeming contradiction was always there. In person, she could come off as reserved, demure (albeit with a sharp sense of humor), yet she wrote fearlessly and sometimes explicitly about bodies and sex, death, crime, tragedy—the damage people inflict on one another in the name of love.
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