I first came to love Alice Munro’s stories for the resonance I felt with her subject matter—the close examination of the lives of girls and women; the tension she returns to again and again between the modest, rural place of her youth and the seemingly sophisticated world of the city, and the tension of being educated beyond one’s place of origin; the intricacies of family love; the implicit feminism of her worldview. One of the joys for me of reading Munro is how her work often makes me stop, pause, and re-see my life, especially the place of my youth—a small, working-class Connecticut town where most of my classmates ended their educations at high school, and where our Jewish family was such an anomaly—with eyes enlarged by the sensitivity of Munro’s stories. What gets me about a given Munro story—or at least the ones I love most—is how deeply I feel the material, an experience that has inspired me again and again to feel my way into the material of my own fictional worlds.
I didn't quite understand what the mapping is about. Is it the scenes? The timeline? Lovely story, anyway!