No midweek newsletter this week but there are a few things I wanted to send your way.
Alice Munro died on Monday, at the age of 93. I’ve read nearly everything she’s written, and she’s written a lot. I wanted to send along what I wrote on Instagram, mostly because I really want to keep talking about her.
People sometimes say Alice Munro tells the same story over and over again. Depending on who they are, they might say it derisively - or they might say it, as I do, with great reverence. Alice Munro taught me about ambivalence, and quiet, and quiet cruelty, and the wages of the women’s interior work. There’s a short story of hers about a woman who’s tricked by two devious teen girls into uprooting her life to go live with one of the girl’s fathers. She just shows up one day, certain - because of forged letters of affection - that he wants her. He’s never even thought of it. But he is sick and the house is in shambles and she rights the ship and he just lets inertia take over, and never thinks to ask how she arrived, and she never thinks to mention it explicitly. I think of that story once a month, if not once a week. It is my Roman Empire, and Alice Munro, a true master of her craft, made it. I’m so grateful for the hundreds of short stories, all part of one essential story, that she’s left us.
That story is called “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” from the collection of the same name — also a great place to start if you’ve never read Munro. I also love the collections The Love of a Good Woman, Runaway, and Moons of Jupiter.
The latest episode of features Margaret H. Willison — who many of you may know from Pop Culture Happy Hour — as co-host, talking through BIG CELEBRITY FEELINGS. It’s an episode about John Mulaney and Matty Healy, sure, but it’s really an episode about star image and what happens when that image is ruptured. Click here to listen wherever you you listen to podcasts, click here to see the ROBUST show notes — and sign-up to get new episodes in your inbox here:
We also need listener questions for future episodes on JEANS (with
), on home renovation shows (particularly in terms of class and taste) with Classy’s Jonathan Menjivar, on weird Tiktok trends (with weird internet expert Katie Notopolous) and on Ben Affleck (with Jenn Romolini). The very simple form is right here!
For Garden Study, I gave a little behind the scenes look at planting 500+ dahlias this past week — including tips on pre-sprouting, taking cuttings, how to get a small cohort of children to help, etc. etc. You can click below to read, but if you want future editions of Garden Study sent your way (we’re doing houseplant troubleshooting later this month, garden profiles from readers all over the place, shade garden planning, and a lot more) you have to opt-in to receive Garden Study emails. Here’s how.
Behind the Scenes: Planting 500+ Dahlias
Last year, my best friend on the island and I asked ourselves: do we want to transform large swaths of our property into a dahlia micro farm? Do we want to learn a bunch and fail a bunch and allocate physical and financial resources to this project? We live in a small corner of Washington state that is home to some of the most renowned breeders and growers in the country.
Finally, I’m gearing up for Friday’s Thread on MENOPAUSE BRAIN. The prompt comes from Culture Study subscriber Liz:
Menopause Brain! The beauty, superpowers gained, adjustments, changes of it all, what we let go of, what we tap into as our hormones / brains change in this time (all genders go through brain changes when hormones shift). The new research (finally!) coming out about this extraordinary time, how our brains go through a "remodel", a "pruning of the fluff" (according to neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi Phd similar to puberty, pregnancy) enable a new type of being, focus, life force, purpose, deep contentedness as we "let go of caring about stuff that doesn't matter". Yes we loose sleep, have hot flashes, anxiety, etc. but that's part of the remodel. What's the good stuff that comes out of it and how do we embrace it? I'm up for learning more about the superpowers of it all. This community is the perfect place to explore.
Paid subscribers will get the thread in their inbox tomorrow morning and I cannot wait for the discussion; if you’ve been considering the jump to paid, maybe this is the push you need.
That’s all for this week — the newsletter will be back on schedule this Sunday!
I found out Munro died from your instagram and I immediately burst into tears, which was unexpected! But her work meant so much to me. Taught me that the little things in my life mattered, too. I think all the time about the line from Lives of Girls and Women, "People's lives in Jubilee, as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable--deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum."
And, if I may with a little romantic TMI--when my husband and I started dating in college, I told him about Alice Munro (shout out to my weekly 3 hr Canadian Lit class!) and he told me that one of his favorite movies at the time was based on one of her stories--Sarah Polley's Away From Her, about a woman with Alzheimer's. It was one of the clues I first had that I would love this man, probably forever (that was in 2008 and we're still here!)
AHP: feel free to share the contents of the kit I give therapy clients who are entering menopause, along with the assurance that life after menopause is pretty reliably an upgrade.
Chapter on midlife, in The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine
Sandra Loh, The bitch is back: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-bitch-is-back/308642/
Mary Reufle, Pause: https://granta.com/pause/ (reprinted in my book, Aging: An Apprenticeship)
Various, depending on the woman: Margaret Manganroth Gullette’s Safe at Last in The Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel helped me get my bearings, for instance. (I didn’t know I expected my life to be a progress narrative until it stopped being one.)