Lives of Girls and Women

Munro's linked chapters follow Del Jordan from childhood into adolescence in and around Jubilee, Ontario, anchored by two competing households: her uncle Benny's chaotic farm, where a mail-order bride named Madeleine arrives and turns violent before disappearing again, and her own mother Ada's, where Ada sells encyclopedias door to door and argues openly with neighbors about sex, superstition, and a woman's right to want more than Jubilee is prepared to offer her.

The chapter that lends the book its title turns on an earlier, blunter education than Garnet ever provides: Fern Dogherty, a boarder in the Jordan house who sells encyclopedias alongside Ada, is carrying on an affair with Art Chamberlain, a married radio announcer, and Del ends up alone with Art when he asks her to search Fern's room for some old letters, then exposes himself to her in the woods before skipping town and writing Fern a letter ending things between them. Munro refuses Del any dramatic reaction to what is unmistakably a violation, letting the scene settle into the same flat, cataloguing tone as everything else in Del's adolescence, which is itself the point, how easily a girl's first real brush with adult male desire gets filed away among a crowded catalogue of ordinary small-town incidents rather than singled out as the trauma it is.

Del's own adolescence culminates in Garnet French, a baptism-obsessed young man whose religious fervor and physical hold on her Munro treats with more ambivalence than romance, since wanting Garnet and wanting to sit her scholarship exams turn out to be mutually exclusive. Del's closest friend Naomi, by contrast, marries young and settles into exactly the life Del is trying to write her way out of, a quieter, sadder foil running underneath the louder Garnet plot.

Del's own religious appetite runs alongside her sexual one: she samples the Anglican, Presbyterian, and United churches in turn, hoping ceremony itself might supply the certainty her mother's rationalism and Uncle Benny's superstition both withhold, an experiment Munro treats as continuous with, not separate from, her later hunger for whatever Garnet's baptism is actually offering her.

The closing 'Epilogue: The Photographer' jumps years ahead to Del as a young writer plotting a Gothic novel about the reclusive Sherriff family, complete with an invented, faintly sinister photographer boarder entirely of her own devising. Visiting the real Bobby Sherriff, an institutionalized member of that family, she watches him perform an odd, formal dance step on his porch that she senses carries a private meaning she cannot translate, and abandons her planned novel once she recognizes that fidelity itself was the wrong ambition, that fiction has to invent and betray its sources to reach something truer than an accurate record ever could.