Salon friends, I’ve had a week of surprises. First, my phone was pickpocketed (I’m fine!); then, jogging in the Tuileries, the most bizarre sun shower turned to torrential downpour. Later, my Eurostar was delayed.
Strangely, I actually enjoyed being phone free for a day. The train delay didn’t affect my trip. And after the rain, I saw the most incredible rainbow stretch over the Seine.
On Tuesday we lost one of the greats: Canadian writer Alice Munro (1931-2024). I’d like to dedicate this week’s salon to one of her short stories: “The Office” from her debut collection Dance of the Happy Shades (1968).
I first discovered Munro as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, a women’s college where so many things began for me: my need to examine womanhood, my thirst for language, my persistent desire to write and to sing—despite many attempts to stop.
Rereading “The Office” as a grown woman felt like reading my own consciousness. Its surface story is simple: a first-person narrator decides to rent an office where she will write à la Room of One’s Own. But the real story lies in the periphery, as so many women’s stories do, in her journey of considering herself a writer, obtaining “the office” (the room, the position), and using it for the purpose she sets out to use it for.
So many of Munro’s lines, while propelling the plot forward, hold entire vistas of meaning and emotion. Here is one of my favorites:
Unreasonably as ever, guilt assailed me but I typed on.
The placement of “unreasonably as ever” harbors the perfect ambiguity: is the guilt unreasonable, or the narrator’s choice to write? She herself isn’t sure. As I am not sure.
Let us not be misled: being reasonable is not necessarily desirable. And as far as I’m concerned, being reasonable is not a woman’s affair.
The narrator is surprised to find that her husband has virtually no qualms with her decision to rent the office and that the entire process is easy: the many obstacles preventing her from her work were entirely imaginary—at first.
Eventually, her landlord begins to demand her attention, interrupting her work to judge and question her. Accepting his unwanted gifts despite herself (a plant, even though she hates houseplants; a teapot, even though she drinks only coffee), she eventually vows to pay him no attention, refusing to respond to his knocks and notes. But her resolve (and failure) to ignore him ultimately takes up all the headspace that she would have otherwise used for writing.
Munro’s ingenuity lies in the true-to-life ambiguity of the whole story. On the one hand, one might read it as a fable of self-fulfilling prophecy. The woman, so preoccupied with how others will negatively react to her decision to rent an office, conjures her fear into reality. On the other hand, we can consider that her fears were well-founded, that many men cannot understand what a woman—a wife and mother no less—could or should possibly be doing alone in a room with her thoughts and words.
Perhaps the title of the story is key: instead of seeking a room of her own, the narrator seeks “the office.” But being a writer is not an “office,” nor is being a woman. Renting an “office” does not justify writing. Nothing need justify a woman’s desire to write but her desire to write.
I related so much to the narrator’s difficulty to mitigate her worries about others, her need to justify writing in some public way, and her inability to communicate and obtain her needs—how when she actually succeeds, the guilt that follows overrides the attainment.
This week I beat myself up about going to Oxford for the Kellogg Scholars’ Dinner: wasn’t it indulgent to make a trip just for myself, for one night, rearranging obligations to make it happen?
Munro’s story gave me perspective: so many women struggle to unapologetically do things for themselves. The guilt is not only unpleasant, it’s a waste of precious time.
I am a writer, even if my “office” is a messy desk in the kitchen, a worn notebook in my handbag, a conversation at a dinner party.
I am a writer, even if I don’t have a plaque with my name on it saying so.
Thanks to Munro, I’m making efforts to stop justifying. Instead, I’ll write. I hope many of you out there will, too.
Bonne semaine, et à la prochaine !
Rachel
Thank you for sharing this story in such a personal and authentic way! I look forward to reading it!
Thank you, this is so true for me as a visual artist.