85 things to know about master short story writer Alice Munro - CBC.ca

85 things to know about master short story writer Alice Munro - CBC.ca

85 things to know about master short story writer Alice Munro - CBC.ca

Posted: 28 Apr 2017 12:00 AM PDT

Alice Munro (Derek Shapton/McClelland & Stewart)

Literary legend Alice Munro celebrates her 88th birthday on July 10, 2019. The Canadian writer is revered worldwide as a master of the short story, with 14 acclaimed collections and a Nobel Prize to prove it.

Below, we've curated a list of 85 facts from her remarkable life and writing career.

This includes the Nobel Prize, three Governor General's Literary Awards, two Scotiabank Giller Prizes, two Trillium Book Awards, the National Book Critics' Circle Award, three O.Henry Awards and the Man Booker International Prize. In the 1987 photo above, Alice (left) is accepting the Governor General's Literary Award from Governor General Jeanne Sauvé. (Blaise Edwards/Canadian Press)

2. She was born Alice Laidlaw on July 10, 1931, in Wingham, Ont. Munro was raised on what she calls a "collapsing enterprise of a fox and mink farm."

3. Munro turned to short stories when she started writing because, as a housewife with three young daughters, she didn't have the time to devote to a novel. She thought she'd write short stories for a while, and found the form captivated her.

4. She would think about her stories during her babies' naps before she ever put pen to paper. But the problem with this scenario was that if another housewife knocked on the door, Munro couldn't really use "thinking" as an excuse to shoo the person away.

5. Despite her stratospheric success with the short story form, Munro often spoke of her wish to write a novel. "I'm always trying," she told the Guardian in 2003. "Between every book I think, well now, it's time to get down to the serious stuff."

Image: Helen Stratton [public domain]. Published on page 130 of The Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen circa 1899. Fact: Alice Munro in conversation with Diana Athill⁴ (Helen Stratton/Wikimedia Commons)

7. By the age of 14, she knew she wanted to be a writer. "But back then you didn't go around announcing something like that," she said. "You didn't call attention. Maybe it was being Canadian, maybe it was being a woman. Maybe both."

8. Her first book of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, was written over a 15-year span.

9. When Munro got copies of the book from her publisher, she hid them in a closet so she wouldn't have to look at them. One night, she finally took out a copy and read it, and thought "It's not as bad as I thought." This book went on to win the Governor General's Literary Award in 1968.

10. Margaret Atwood read Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, the year it was published in Canada. Atwood remembers being curled up beside a bar heater in freezing cold Edmonton when she read it and thinking "This is the real thing — wow."

Fact: Remember Roger Mortimer by Alice Munro⁵ (Cambridge University Press)

12. Dickens's A Child's History of England was full of grisly beheadings. Munro would reframe the stories in the book with herself as the heroine, and change the endings: "If I really liked my heroine in the story I didn't get her head chopped off — I changed the story so that wouldn't happen."

13. Munro's childhood home was turned into a beauty parlour called Total Indulgence.

14. She graduated from Wingham District High School with the highest standing in her class in 1949.¹

15. She didn't attract much attention outside of Canada until her work began appearing in the New Yorker. Her first New Yorker story was Royal Beatings in 1977.

16. Acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar based his film Julieta on a trio of Alice Munro stories — Chance, Soon and Silence from her 2004 collection Runaway. Watch the trailer below:

17. According to Munro, no one in Clinton, Ont., where she's lived since the 1970s, knows who she is, "or if they do, they're a little embarrassed." 

"I like that nobody here cares much about writing," she said. "It allows me to feel quite free."

18. Reading wasn't really encouraged in her family. Once it was obvious that Munro had turned into a serious reader, her mother referred to her as "another Emma McClure!" McClure was a recluse relative of theirs who, according to Munro, "had been reading day and night for 35 years, with no time out to get married, learn the names of her nephews and nieces or comb her hair when she came into town."

19. Munro's mother, Anne Laidlaw, started suffering the effects of Parkinson's disease when Munro was about 13 years old. As the eldest child, Munro had to take over much of the housework, but she said, "It gave me a sense of responsibility, purpose, being important. It didn't bother me at all."

20. Even when Munro became a housewife herself, it wasn't the housework she resented: "Housework never really bothered me... what bothered me about it later was that it was expected to be your life... when you're a housewife you are constantly interrupted. You have no space in your life. It isn't the fact that you do the laundry."

21. Munro said that her own stories start in "almost any old way at all that I can get into it."

22. Out of high school, Munro won a two-year scholarship to the University of Western Ontario, but there was no money to continue. She thinks that had she finished her university degree, "It might have made me a lot more cautious. It might have made me scared of being a writer."

23. Going to university instead of staying home to look after her mother is something Munro still feels guilty about. She's called writing about her mother her "central material in life... If I just relax, that's what will come up."

24. Her first published story, The Dimensions of a Shadow, appeared in the University of Western Ontario's undergraduate creative writing magazine, Folio, in the spring of 1950.

25. When the editor of the magazine read it, he ran down the hall waving his hands around, yelling "You've GOT to read this!"

26. The Royal Canadian Mint issued a commemorative Alice Munro coin in 2014 to celebrate her Nobel Prize win. The coin's design includes a passage from her short story Messenger.

Canadian author Alice Munro reads from her book The View From Castle Rock at a ceremony held by the Royal Canadian Mint to celebrate her Nobel Prize win where they unveiled a 99.99% pure silver five-dollar coin at the Great Victoria Public Library in Victoria, B.C., Monday, March 24, 2014. (Chad Hipolito/Canadian Press)

27. One of Munro's early stories, published in university, ended with a character saying "Jesus Christ!" This was very hard for her family.

28. She met her first husband, James Munro, at the university library. She was always hungry in university because she had little money for food. He was eating Peps — peppermints coated in chocolate. He dropped one on the floor and looked around before picking it up and eating it, to make sure no one saw him eat something off the floor. Alice looked at him and said "I'll eat it."

29. They got married at Christmastime. Alice Munro was 20 years old. She couldn't afford a big white dress, so she wore a burgundy velvet dress.

30. After her first story collection won the Governor General's Literary Award in 1968, Munro felt a lot of pressure to write a novel. She tried, to no avail. Her publisher, Douglas Gibson, told her, "Alice, they're all wrong. You're a great short story writer. If you want to go on publishing short stories for the rest of your life, I'll go on publishing them."

31. She spoke out against banning books on CBC Television in 1979, after the school board in her native Huron County banned her book Lives of Girls and Women from the Grade 12 syllabus.

The author speaks out against a Huron County school board that seeks to remove certain books from reading lists. 8:26

32. Both of her husbands, James Munro and Gerald Fremlin, were understanding and supportive of her writing, which she has described as a "marvellous gift."

33. From the ages of 25 to 35, Munro feared she didn't have the talent to be a writer. During this time, she threw out more writing than she finished and suffered from horrible writer's block and anxiety.

34. In 1963, she and her husband James opened a bookstore in Victoria, B.C. She credits working in Munro's Books with helping her overcome writer's block: "The writing ceased to be this all-important thing that I had to prove myself with. The pressure came off." She wrote two stories during her three years working in the store, and both were published.

35. The first day the bookstore opened they made $175, which they thought was "marvellous."

Bookseller Taliah Lundstrom stacks copies of Alice Munro's Dear Life at Munro's Books in Victoria, B.C. Fact: the Times Colonist⁶ (Chad Hipolito/Canadian Press)

37. Munro credits her success as a writer partly to not heeding something that was often repeated within her family: "You must recognize your limitations."

38. She admitted in an interview that she'd smoked marijuana before, but didn't say what she thought about it. 

39. She originally met her second husband, Gerald Fremlin, during university. Alice used to ride the bus with Fremlin's girlfriend, who would tell Alice all about him. Based on the stories, Alice thought the girlfriend was "the most fortunate girl in the world."

40. Fremlin sent Munro her first fan letter, about one of her stories published in the university magazine.

41. After Munro moved back to Ontario in 1973 upon the dissolution of her first marriage, Fremlin saw her being interviewed on the CBC by Harry Boyle. In the interview, Munro said she was divorced and living in London. 

The Ontario-born author talks to broadcaster Harry Boyle about her memories of a small-town childhood. Credit: <em>Something I've been Meaning to Tell You</em>, Alice Munro, Penguin Canada 42:04

42. Fremlin phoned her up and told her he had one of her books, but then said, "Well, it was Book of the Month Club."

43. Canadian singer Measha Brueggergosman is such a big fan of Munro's that she once wrote her a fan letter, urging Munro to keep writing. "I am so glad she followed my advice," Brueggergosman said jokingly. Brueggergosman defended Munro's The Love of a Good Woman on CBC's Canada Reads in 2004.

44. Munro said that she's drawn to writing about small towns because "the small town is like a stage for human lives."

45. After Munro won the Nobel Prize, 22 Minutes did this sketch in which Margaret Atwood (Cathy Jones) backhandedly compliments her:

46. She's thrown stories away and said she's never regretted doing it.

47. In her early story The Office, a woman rents an office to write and is so bothered by her landlord that she has to move out. This is autobiographical: Munro has never been able to write in an office, even when the landlords aren't bothersome.

48. Her grandmother used to read her stories when she was a young girl, and she remembers it being a wondrous experience — perhaps too good: "It was a great disappointment when I tried to read them myself."

49. Munro calls waiting around for reviews of her books "a dumb way to live."

From left to right: Jane Urquhart, Miriam Toews and Alistair MacLeod. (Elsa Trillat/Carol Loewen/Ted Rhodes/Canadian Press)

51. Munro was the 13th woman — and the first Canadian — to win the Nobel Prize in literature. She was 82 when she won it.

52. In 2006, Margaret Atwood described Munro as having achieved "international literary sainthood."¹

53. She's been known to take her stories back from her publishers and re-work them after submitting them, even when the publishers don't agree that the story needs changing.

54. Sarah Polley adapted Munro's story The Bear Came Over the Mountain into the acclaimed feature film Away from Her after reading it in The New Yorker on a plane.

A photo of the Alice Munro Literary Garden in Wingham, Ont. (Courtesy of North Huron Museum⁷)

56. Munro's editor at The New Yorker since 2001, Deborah Treisman, has said that when she's reading Munro's stories, she'll sometimes cross out a line or a paragraph that seems extraneous, only to discover 20 pages later that it was absolutely vital.

57. Munro was very fond of a restaurant called Bailey's Fine Dining in Goderich, Ont.² The restaurant was decimated by a tornado that hit the town in 2011 and it never re-opened.³

58. As a young reader, she had a violent reaction to the misogyny in the work of Leo Tolstoy and D.H. Lawrence, saying it was "like claws trying to fasten [her] down."² It made her wonder, "How can I be a writer when I'm the object of other writers?"

59. One of the most popular games amongst Munro's friends at elementary school was "funerals," where one person got to be the corpse and the others would stage a mock funeral, complete with "flowers" (weeds) and a tearful viewing.²

60. When Munro's father, Robert Laidlaw, was dying, he wrote a book. Munro made sure that it was published posthumously.² The novel was about pioneer families in the Southwest Interior and Munro said, "he has real gifts as a writer."

61. Munro once told her father that Margaret Laurence was a friend of hers, and he said, "But Alice, she's a really good writer!"²

62. Two reporters from the Paris Review visited Munro in Clinton in 1994 and asked if she knew of any other local writers. She drove them past a tumbledown house where a bare-chested man sat on the back stoop typing on a typewriter, surrounded by cats. "I don't know him," Munro told them, "but I'm dying of curiosity to find out what he's up to."

63. It typically takes her at least a month to write a story and she doesn't show works in progress to anyone.

64. While she was writing The Lives of Girls and Women, Munro was looking after her three daughters as well as one of her daughter's friends. She also worked at Munro's Books two days a week. She would write until 1 a.m. and wake up at 6 a.m., and became concerned she would die of a heart attack.

Fact: Live hangout with Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro⁸ (Signet Classics)

66. She named Audrey Atkinson, the nurse character in her story Friend of My Youth, after a real person. There was an auction to raise money for the Blyth Theatre near where she lives in Clinton, and one of the prizes was to have the winning bidder's name go into Munro's next story. The honour cost Ms. Atkinson $400.

67. Munro taught creative writing at York University in Toronto in 1973, but quit because she hated her class, which was all male except for "one girl who hardly got to speak." She called their writing "incomprehensible and trite; they seemed intolerant of anything else."

68. She credits the Southern writers Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter and Carson McCullers with validating her desire to write about small towns and rural people.

69. Munro sees herself as "a friendly person who is not very sociable."

Fact: Global News⁹

71. In her house in Clinton, Munro would write at a small desk in the corner of the dining room, facing a window overlooking the driveway.

72. She acknowledges that she wrote a lot about people's clothes in her early stories, and credits that to not having the clothes she wanted when she was younger.

73. Munro fell in love with the stories of Anton Chekhov as a teenager and was dazzled by the "extreme importance he'd give to ordinary life and ordinary people." She calls discovering his literary style a "revelation."

74. Of the autobiographical pieces in her collection Dear Life, Munro said, "I never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centred than most people."

Alice Munro in 1979. (Roger Arar/Canadian Press)

76. Growing up, Munro was hounded by her aunts and grandparents to "master the arts of knitting and darning." She once shocked them by telling them she planned to actually throw things out when she grew up, rather than mend them.

77. She knows a lot about her characters: "what clothes they'd choose, what they were like at school, what happened before and what will happen after the part of their lives I'm dealing with."

78. She said she finally "came out of the closet" as a writer at about 40 years of age.

79. She is partial to white wine, particularly sauvignon blanc.

80. Joseph Boyden jokingly called her "the bane of every creative writing teacher's existence" because she breaks all the rules of the short story, "the end result being some of the most brilliant fiction I've ever read."

81. The Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story was launched in 2015 in Wingham, Ont.

82. Her story Dear Life was re-imagined as an orchestral work and performed at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in 2015.

83. One of the things she hates about getting older is when people call her "dear." She finds it "absolutely dreadful."

84. One of the things she loves about getting older? "Humiliation vanishes."

A portrait of Alice Munro. (Kristin Ross)

This list was first published in 2016, to celebrate Alice Munro's 85th birthday.

¹ From Carried Away: A Personal Selection of Stories by Alice Munro, introduction by Margaret Atwood ©2006. Published by Knopf.

² From The Best of Writers & Company by Eleanor Wachtel ©2016. Published by Biblioasis.

³ Goderich, Ont., town office.

⁴ Alice Munro in conversation with Diana Athill

⁵ "Remember Roger Mortimer" by Alice Munro in The New Yorker

​⁶ Jim Munro retiring, four employees will take over Munro's Books by Amy Smart, Times Colonist

⁷ Creative Huron

⁸ Live hangout on air with Alice Munro in conversation with Margaret Atwood

⁹ Alice Munro wins Nobel Prize

50 States of True Crime - The New York Times

Posted: 26 Jul 2019 10:32 AM PDT

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CreditRoss MacDonald

From the safety of your armchair, lose yourself in some classic — and completely terrifying — real-life stories of murder, mayhem, corruption, arson and robbery.

This memoir of an activist lawyer is essentially "the story of Walter McMillian, whom Stevenson began representing in the late 1980s when he was on death row for killing a young white woman in Monroe­ville, Ala., the hometown of Harper Lee."

"Not since 'The Shining' has family life off the grid seemed as terrifying as it does in 'Pilgrim's Wilderness,' about a homesteading family in which things have gone very, very wrong."

"Lazar's father died in 1975 of distinctly unnatural causes in a stairwell at a Phoenix parking garage. His name was Ed Lazar, and he was an accountant with ties to the once-booming land-fraud community in Arizona."

Leveritt unravels a sensational case in West Memphis, Ark., where three teenage boys were tried and convicted in the 1992 murders of three 8-year-old boys.

CreditRoss MacDonald

"Was Patricia Hearst responsible for her crimes, or was she a victim who did what she needed to do to survive? Or is the truth somewhere in between? ... Toobin uses his knowledge of the justice system and his examination of the evidence to pierce the veil of spectacle and make sense of many contradictory elements."

"The broad outlines of what happened at Columbine High School in Colorado ... are well known. Yet what's amazing is how much of Cullen's book still comes as a surprise."

CreditRoss MacDonald

In 1973, Peter Kelly — 18 — was arrested and charged with his mother's vicious murder. "Convinced of Peter's innocence as they were incensed by the overzealousness of the state police, citizens of the small, western Connecticut community in which he and his unmarried mother lived alone joined together to raise his bond money, hire him a lawyer and get him out of jail."

Anne Marie Fahey was a young secretary working for the governor of Delaware when she met Tom Capano, a wealthy attorney and former state prosecutor who turned out to be a psychopath.

In this deconstruction of Andrew Cunanan's killing spree and suicide, "the breadth and thoroughness of Orth's research are often staggering."

Berendt's book, "a combination of true crime and travelogue," follows the case of Jim Williams, a rich antiques dealer "charged in the 1981 shooting of Danny Hansford, a tempestuous young man known as 'a walking streak of sex' to both men and women in town."

CreditRoss MacDonald

In this "honest, creepily fascinating memoir/true-crime story," Spalding recalls the time she spent serving on the jury of a murder trial, and goes back to reinvestigate the crime.

"A compelling account of the killing of two game wardens in early 1981 in an Idaho desert by a 'mountain man' named Claude Dallas."

"'The Devil in the White City,' a book as lively as its title, has the inspiration to combine two distantly related late-19th-century stories into a narrative that is anything but quaint. One describes planning and preparation for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. ... The book's other path follows a prototypical American serial killer who ... built and operated a conveniently located World's Fair Hotel, complete with walk-in vault, greased wooden chute and person-sized basement kiln. As for where this would lead, 'only Poe could have dreamed the rest.'"

"By 1868 the formerly quiet town of Indianapolis was becoming 'a city of strangers,' and nearby Cold Spring was a more inviting place to settle — except for that blood-soaked patch of ground on the west bank of the White River where the bodies of Jacob and Janey Young were found on the morning of Sept. 13."

In 1900, the brutal murder of the farmer John Hossack galvanized Iowa — especially after it appeared that his wife, Margaret, had been the one to bludgeon him to death.

Capote's famous "nonfiction novel" about the Clutter murders got a rave review in The Times, which called it "a grieving testament of faith in what used to be called the soul."

Sharkey's tale of an F.B.I. agent-turned-criminal is "a close examination of the mind of an ordinary man driven to an extraordinary act."

The women — "all prostitutes and drug addicts, which made them vulnerable and defenseless, expendable in a jurisdiction that's centrally positioned along the route of the Gulf Coast drug trade" — were killed between 2005 and 2009.

CreditRoss MacDonald

"In the early morning of May 12, 1994, Sarah Perry's 30-year-old mother, Crystal, was stabbed to death in her home, while Sarah, who was 12 at the time, sat frozen on her bed on the other side of a thin wall. The murder, which went unsolved for 12 years, marked Perry, infecting her with a 'viscous blackness' unleashed by the killer's act. Like the partial solar eclipse Perry and her mother witnessed two days before the murder, this blackness blotted out the daughter's and the mother's former selves. 'After the Eclipse' is Perry's effort to look behind this shadow."

In 1988, when he was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, Simon followed a squad of homicide detectives in Baltimore, "chronicling the mind-numbing violence that has become synonymous with virtually every American city."

"The Brothers" examines how ­Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, became the Boston Marathon Bombers.

"In March 1969, Jane Mixer, a 23-year-old University of Michigan law school student, signed up on a campus ride-board to travel home for spring break. Soon after, her body was found with two bullets in her brain and a stocking so ambitiously wound around her neck that her head was nearly severed." Thirty-five years later, thanks to a DNA match, someone was finally arrested for the crime.

"This is the dark side of Lake Wobegon. The victims and villains of 'Final Harvest' are not stronger, smarter or above average. Like other Americans, they were swept up in the tornado of social and economic change in American agriculture."

CreditRoss MacDonald

When the white supremacist Richard Barrett was murdered, "a young black man, Vincent McGee, was accused and convicted of the killing. Supposed motive: Mr. McGee's anger at being underpaid for maintenance work Mr. Barrett had hired him to do. But the situation was so full of unanswered questions that it brought out Mr. Safran's inner Truman Capote."

In an area of the Ozarks blighted by poverty and crime, a local Vietnam vet went on a killing spree. Cuneo decided to find out why.

"Krakauer looks at the University of Montana, the local police and the prosecutor's office through the eyes of five women who reported rapes or attempted rapes between 2010 and 2012."

Eli Stutzman was a respected Amish farmer. He was also, as it turns out, a murderer.

"Viewed in the proper perspective, Pileggi's story is a morality tale about two men who tried to begin their lives anew by moving to Las Vegas, that 'city with no memory,' Pileggi calls it, 'the nation's only morality car wash.' One of the men was brains, the other muscle, but each left his lasting mark on America's gambling capital."

"The murders of Half and Susanne Zantop, popular professors at Dartmouth, stunned the residents of somnolent Hanover, N.H., where only four murders had been committed in the last century."

"In 2003, the world discovered what a night nurse named Charles Cullen had been doing during the preceding 16 years. He had killed a judge, a priest and an unknown but large number of other people. He may have been the most prolific serial killer in history."

"Two buddies on a camping trip wound up stranded in the desert. They became so desperate that Raffi Kodikian stabbed David Coughlin in the heart, purportedly as an act of mercy killing. The setting was Rattlesnake Canyon in New Mexico, described here as a crack in the landscape and 'a moral fracture as well.'"

"In mid-December 2010, the Suffolk County police discovered the bodies of four women, each wrapped in burlap, on a desolate, bramble-covered stretch of sand called Gilgo Beach. It was a gothic whodunit for the internet age, replete with prostitutes, drugs, family dysfunction, investigative incompetence, not to mention a strange, insular beach community and, of course, the websites of Craigslist and Backpage, where the women had advertised for customers."

"When a wealthy mother and daughter were gunned down gangland-style at their Louisville, Ky., home in 1984 with no obvious motive, a detective predicted: 'That family has a dark cloud in it somewhere. Find that cloud and you've found your killer.' It was not until 10 months later, in the wake of a seemingly unrelated triple murder in Winston-Salem, N.C., that the dark cloud emerged."

CreditRoss MacDonald

Homicides are rare in North Dakota, so when three people from the same small town were killed, everyone in the state paid attention.

In 1977, "in a period of eight days, two women, one a nurse, the other an optometry student, had been kidnapped, compelled under threat of death to cash checks at various suburban banks, robbed and raped." The man arrested for the crimes, William Stanley Milligan, "became the first person in this country's history to be declared not guilty by reason of insanity on the grounds of a psychiatric diagnosis of 'multiple personality.'"

"Grann's book, about how dozens of members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma in the 1920s were shot, poisoned or blown to bits by rapacious whites who coveted the oil under their land, is close to impeccable. It's confident, fluid in its dynamics, light on its feet."

In 1977, Jentz and a fellow college student, on a 4,200-mile bike journey, were attacked by an ax-wielding stranger: "Understatement is the quiet power that fuels Jentz's writing, and our rage as we read it. Here is a woman viewing the aftermath of her attempted killing through the smeary haze of her own blood."

CreditRoss MacDonald

"Equal parts serious journalism and sisterly sass, 'Busted' is a personable and fast-reading ride along with two Philadelphia Daily News journalists as they chase a police corruption story down the rabbit hole."

"Two very short sections open Leah Carroll's memoir: the description of her mother's murder in a seedy hotel room, and the description of her father's death in an equally seedy hotel room 14 years later. Carroll proceeds from these haunting twin plot points through a patchwork of vignettes, reportage and reflection that reaches after her absent parents with sensitive longing."

In a 1994 case that riveted the nation, a hysterical Susan Smith told police officers that her car had been stolen with her two small sons still inside it. As it turned out, something quite different had happened.

Late one night in 1973, four teenagers sitting around a campfire at a South Dakota state park were gunned down. A fifth, called the "Gitchie Girl," survived.

CreditRoss MacDonald

"A tale of sexual assault, greed, power, political corruption and drug addiction unfolded daily for years in the unassuming, sleepy little town of Dyersburg, Tenn., in the chambers of a venerable judge."

"A fast-paced true-crime tale about a Mexican drug cartel and the Texas cops who chase it. ... Del Bosque based her account on scores of personal interviews and reams of court documents, and proves herself fluent in detailing the exceedingly different, but equally rich, milieus of cartel kingpins, Texas equestrians and federal investigators."

"A compelling volume that traces the sad, violent history of the Gilmore family and shows, in its author's words, 'how its webwork of dark secrets and failed hopes helped create the legacy that, in part, became my brother's impetus to murder.'"

CreditRoss MacDonald

In 1981, a rape and murder case rocked a small town in Vermont when the perpetrators were discovered to be 15 and 16 years old.

Hesse's tale of an arson spree in Accomack County, Va., "has all the elements of a lively crime procedural: courtroom drama, forensic trivia, toothsome gossip, vexed sex."

In his examination of the murder of two young women in Seattle, Sanders — a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist — discovered that the killer, who was mentally ill, was not getting the treatment he needed for his disease.

Sidiropolis explores what life was like in Wheeling, W.Va., in the early 1900s, when murder and corruption were rampant and the city was ruled by organized crime.

A biography of Wisconsin's most prolific serial killer, who was also known as the "Milwaukee Cannibal."

In one of Wyoming's most notorious cases, two sisters were abducted and thrown off a bridge — and one of them lived to identify her attackers.

Newsroom Saturday short story: The Grave of the Heart Eater, by Rijula Das - Newsroom

Posted: 26 Jul 2019 11:07 AM PDT

ReadingRoom

'A girl, a princess no less, who once lived and ate out the heart of a squealing child every night': a short story by Wellington writer Rijula Das. Photography by Peter Black.

Soon after my father left, mother and I moved to this hick town. We have a large corner room to ourselves in the Trainee Hostel. She says we'll soon move into the employee housing where we can have a proper apartment with a kitchen and a drawing room. The long corridor with its unlived rooms and rows of shower cubicles at the end of the floor makes her nervous. 'Just until they sort out the paperwork,' she tells me over and over, 'soon we'll have a TV.'

I walk around the Employee Housing after school because there's a set of rusty swings up there. By four it is enemy territory. The other children, The Gang, gather there in the afternoons and move towards me in a shoal. The swing is theirs; I can only steal it in noon-time when they're not allowed to come out, imprisoned under the vigilant gaze of their stay-at-home mothers. They have a leader— a small and wiry, short-haired Pygmy leader who loathes me. I sometimes see her looking at me from the window when I'm on the swings. If I look up at her, she closes the curtains.

When I round the corner to the Trainee Hostel, Aziz Mama is already standing outside the entrance, looking at his watch. He's promised me an 'educational trip' round the sticks after weeks of lengthy lectures on The Historical Wonders of Murshidabad. He's promised me gold vases from ancient Persia, poison plates and stuffed crocodiles, mirrors that show only the faces of your enemies, and the grave of the heart-eating princess who was buried alive by her own father. Ma smirks at his stories, but Aziz Mama is proud of this small hick town with its mossy buildings and dead remnants of Mughal era pageantry.

He turns around and frowns at me. 'You look like a monkey. Have you been rolling in the dirt? When is the last time you had a bath?'

'This morning.'

'Liar.'

I thump him on the back. 'I am not a liar.'

'You're a lying monkey. But it's okay. Where's your mother?'

'At work.'

'Isn't she supposed to be back by now? I said we're going to leave by four-thirty. Really, we should've gone in the morning, it's going to close up soon,' he frowns. 'Wait here, I need to go back to the car.'

I follow him instead. Usually he comes on a bicycle—a dark green Atlas bike chipped in places, a dirty insignia blazoned at the helm, one copper man holding the whole world up, bending at the knees, defeated. When he's in our room The Gang gathers around the Trainee Hostel, under our eaves, a few of them always trying to look through the window to the room inside. The half lace curtains flare in the wind of the ceiling fans, the white rod of tube light bounces off the blue washed walls. At such times I stand guard outside our walls. Protecting them, protecting my mother from their prying gaze. They always gather as silently as geckos. When they see me, they recede as one, except the Pygmy leader.

'Your ma has a boyfriend,' someone sniggers from the back.

'Who is he?' the Pygmy asks, twisting her mouth.

'Aziz Mama.'

'Mama?' she mocks. 'You mean your mother's brother?'

I pick up a broken brick and say nothing.

'Aziz is a Muslim name,' she states. 'You're not Muslim.'

'So?'

'So he's not your real uncle,' the leader is unflinching, final in her declaration.

'Boyfriend!' someone shouts again.

I move towards them, blocking their view of the room. When they finally turn and leave I throw the bricks after them anyway.

Once we reach the car Aziz Mama manhandles a crate full of mangoes from the boot. 'Can you close it?'

I jump on top of the boot and it closes with a thud. The metal is hot under my bum. The cardboard box in his hands sags under the weight of fruit as he carries it to our corner room. 'I need to teach you how to store them properly,' he says. 'Come on and make yourself useful.'

'What will you give me if I do?'

'Stop bargaining, you imp.'

'Last time you said you'd bring me an Ashrafi, remember? The same one your grandfather left you, an heirloom, you said.' I put my hands on my hips.

'Next time,' he says and swats the flies buzzing around the stalks of the mangoes, where the gum has run dry and stained the fruit. 'Besides, you're not old enough for heirlooms. You wouldn't know what they are.'

'I know what an Ashrafi is. Pure silver Mughal coins, a rare thing these days, you said.'

'Not so rare in these parts.' Aziz Mama laughs. 'Plenty of pauper princes rotting away in their derelict castles. Royal Mughal blood doesn't alone keep you from starvation.'

We work together. I fetch the newspapers and lay them side by side under my mother's bed like sheets, and Aziz Mama puts the mangoes on them one by one, covering them with leaves. I think of the Ashrafi, pure silver, hunchbacked with curly Arabic. It must be as heavy as the moon.

'If you behave, you may even get it next time I visit. Now turn off the damned fan,' he says. 'It's blowing the newspapers away.'

We sweat in the simmering heat, arranging fruit after fruit in a bed of leaves and old newspapers, our hands sticky from the mango gum. 'The battle of Plassey was fought in a mango grove,' Aziz Mama says. I turn one around, examining it's blackened dented skin for signs of violence, for history or myth. He shakes his head. 'An insignificant skirmish that handed India on a plate to the British, fought in a swamp full of mosquitos and fruit.'

'What are you two up to?' Ma's standing in the doorway, smelling salty in the ripe heat of walking home. Her face slowly cooling from the afternoon heat, her frazzled hair sticking out around her face like a halo.

'Who's going to eat so much, Aziz da? You really shouldn't have.' Aziz Mama told me once that he was younger than my mother. But she calls him Aziz da, like dada, big brother.

'It's from my Desher Bari, you'll like them.'

'What's Desher Bari?' I ask.

'Place in the country, ancestral home. It's where you come from.'

'I come from Calcutta.'

'No, you just lived there. Your Desher Bari is where your father and grandfather come from.'

'Bangladesh, Chittagong I think. But they came before the partition when Bangladesh was still East Pakistan,' Ma supplies. 'Maybe around '42.'

'There you are then, your Desher Bari is Chittagong.'

'But I have never seen it.'

'Still,' he says.

* * *

It's boiling hot inside the car. 'We'll go see Siraj's Hazarduari palace, but before that, we'll take a peek at his aunt's estate.' Aziz Mama starts the engine, the smell of burnt diesel spreads everywhere. 'Do you know who Siraj ud-Daulah was?'

'The last independent Nawab of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. He lost the battle of Plassey and boom, the British East India Company….'

'He was betrayed,' Aziz Mama interrupts Ma. 'His general was in cahoots with the British.'

'Sirajs real palace is under the Ganges,' Ma looks at Aziz Mama.

'What's cahoots?' I ask.

'And these roads have not been repaired since,' Ma laughs.

Aziz Mama pushes back his glasses on the bridge of his nose. I can see his frown in the rear-view mirror from my perch on the backseat. Murshidabad depresses my mother. When we take the train down to Calcutta, she points out the marble dome of the Victoria Memorial during taxi rides across town— 'Look Rumi look, Victoria,' she shrieks. As if that is something worth mentioning every time. Last time she carried a few Murshidabad silk saris with her when we visited. They were coarse, garish things. After my father left, she doesn't want to visit anymore.

'You really should see these places,' Aziz Mama says. 'You know how old some of these things are? Siraj was merely the last of them. This place was a great wealthy settlement long before the British came. But you Calcutta people know nothing.'

The roads are narrower, the closer we get to old town. Where we live, up in Berhampore, the roads are newer though Ma likes to joke about them. Here there are horse carriages everywhere. Not like the ones outside the Victoria Memorial that Ma so excitedly points out every time we pass, which have started looking more and more like chariots with tin foil embossing. Fake silver and red velvet seats, plumes on the horses' heads, as though they're auditioning for Mahabharat on TV. These are more like actual carriages people take to actual places. No fuss, no gilding, but the horses crap a lot. Blobs of sandy tan-coloured dung are all over the roads.

'You'll like it,' Aziz Mama is telling Ma. One eye on the road, with the other he glances sideways from time to time. Ma is fiddling with the radio knob, humming. 'Sometimes they play nice Rabindra sangeet at this time,' she tells him.

* * *

A scrawny looking man in a white vest and blue checked lungi is walking towards us. 'Take a guide, sir. I'll tell you all about this place.'

'Don't need a guide, local.' Aziz Mama is brusque, brushing him away.

'I'm the official caretaker sir, government. See?' He holds out a badge. 'I get five rupees salary every month.'

'Really, five?', Ma says.

'Come on, it's all a trick.'

'No, really? Why do you do this?'

'This is the family tradition, Didi. We've done it for generations. My father was the caretaker before me, and my son,' he pulls towards him a boy of eleven or twelve, 'will do this after me.' The boy is wearing rubber slippers and blue shorts. His hair is oiled but his feet are dirty. 'We want to preserve this place,' he adds.

'It's a ruin.'

'Whatever's left of it. These bricks are hundreds of years old, and they're still standing.'

'Amazing,' Aziz Mama observes dryly. 'But we don't need a guide.'

'No, let him,' Ma whispers, looking at the caretaker's son. 'We'll give him something. It's fine.' My mother has boundless sympathy for other people's children.

The caretaker overtakes us, clears his throat and begins in a high-pitched nasal voice, 'In front of you lies the estate of Begum Ghaseti, and the lake she constructed in the shape of the English alphabet U, a horseshoe all around her lands in the middle of which, on an island stood her palace, which has long since been destroyed. In this lake, pearls, or Moti was cultivated, hence the name Motijheel. or Pearl-lake. This lake, or rather, moat, was built to protect the Begum's palace since cannon-balls could not fly past its range.'

A man and a woman are sitting side by side in front of the lake staring vacuously at a child running in circles. Not far from them a very old woman is shaking grains of rice from her cloth bag and carefully putting them one by one in a small bowl. Unlike the small family, she pays no attention to the guide, or us. The other two are intermittently glancing at us, soaking up the free history lesson with a bemused, relaxed expression. Aziz Mama is glaring at them from time to time for poaching on words he's paying for.

'Many believe that a secret underground tunnel connected the Begum's palace to this antechamber here—the gumkhana—nobody knows what it was used for or what might still remain. Though popular belief through the ages has held that the Begum had salted away the vast majority of her fortune in diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, gold Mohurs and silver Ashrafis into this room for safekeeping, since the political situation was volatile and she feared for her life. It is also said that there's a curse on this place. Nobody knows the truth….'

'Or historical facts,'Aziz Mama mutters.

'But after the British had taken over Murshidabad and Lord Warren Hastings resided in the Begum's palace, a sahib once fired cannon at this antechamber. You can see where it has left a dent, and just there, standing beside his cannon in front of the mosque, he died vomiting blood. There were other attempts, in the name of archaeology, but none survived. Since then, it's been left alone. Even if there's a Nawab's ransom in there, we'll never know.'

'And to think that you'll have lived for generations only inches away from such wealth,' Aziz Mama says.

'Aziz da,' Ma hisses at him.

'So what's your name then, Mian?', he asks, conciliatory under Ma's gaze.

'Basheer, sahib.'

'So Basheer Mian, here's something for your trouble. Send the boy to school.'

'Oh he goes to school sahib, right here. The Begum had a school built on her estate for the children of the royals and the nobles, but now we have a sort of village cooperative, all our boys go there, our own madrasa.'

'Good.'

'We have a small booklet here, sahib, we publish it ourselves, it'll tell you about all the historical attractions of Murshidabad sir, it also has a road map, look.'

'We don't need a guidebook.'

Ma opens her purse and hands the guide a crisp ten rupee note and holds out her hand for a copy of the booklet. Aziz Mama doesn't say anything but walks away towards the shanty tea shop where the car is parked. Ma follows him cautiously, a few steps behind.

I'm left with Basheer Mian's boy sitting on the steps of the royal Begum's mosque, slapping mosquitos from his knees and piling the flattened black bodies on top of one another.

'So where's the heart-eating princess buried?'

'Who?' He looks up. A smear of blood squashed from a fat mosquito runs across his shin, the black blot still sticking to his flaky skin.

'The Kalija Begum. The one buried by her own father.'

He shakes his head. 'She ate livers and she's buried in Katra Masjid, not here.' He looks around, 'But you've got a car.'

"Liver? Are you sure? My uncle told me it was hearts she ate.'

He eyes another buzzing mosquito. 'She had some rare disease, the Hakim prescribed fresh livers, preferably that of young children, but her father realised it was sinful of him to have people killed for her sake so he buried her alive and had a mosque built over both their graves so the prayers of the faithful would wash their sins away.'

'How do you know? My uncle said she ate hearts. He knows a lot.'

'She ate livers,' he repeats stoically. 'Her father was Murshid Quli Khan, the man after whom Murshidabad is named. Before that it was called Maksudabad. You can read all about it in that book,' he points to the one held in my mother's hand. 'My father wrote it.'

They're arguing in the distance. My mother is saying something and Aziz Mama is staring across her, his jaw hard. I don't want to intrude, so I walk around them, keeping my distance.

'I cannot put it off forever,' he says to her.

'And what about us?' My mother glances towards me and falters. They start walking. 'Get in the car,' she yells, and hands me a green coconut with a white straw bobbing up and down. 'We're going to the Hazarduari.'

'But I want to see the heart eater's grave at Katra Masjid.'

'We'll do Hazarduari another day, it's too late now.' Aziz Mama starts the car, backing it away from the Begum's cursed treasure. The loud engine spits heat and fills the car with the smell of burnt diesel.

'Another day,' my mother half-laughs. 'Another day,' she repeats in a whisper.

Aziz Mama turns the car into a narrow mud lane. We jostle through a thicket of banana trees, young palms, the fringed blades of coconuts. Clots of grey hang like grapes over the windshield, gathering, racing us. The bowed curtain of plantain leaves glow fluorescent against the pewter of rainclouds.

* * *

In the front seat they are sitting apart. Ma is looking out of the window on her side, the first spray of rain moving through her before it can reach me. She is humming, and Aziz Mama's eyes are fixed on the road. He says something to her quietly. The radio still plays Tagore's songs. The tune is whiny and meanders in the diesel air far too long.

'When will you be back?'

Aziz Mama moves one hand from the gear stick and covers hers. 'Things will be different when I'm back.'

'Yes.' I can only see half of my mother's face as she turns away from him. 'You'll come back with a wife, a brand new bride, for a start.'

And now my mother is crying. I close my eyes so I don't embarrass her. They do their talking when they think I'm sleeping. The car falls into ditches, splatters mud everywhere, honks unceremoniously at lost cows.

'You knew,' Aziz Mama says.

'But things have changed.'

'Not for them. They're tiring of a long engagement, beginning to think I won't come through.'

'That didn't stop you all these months.' She stops, breathes. 'You don't have to,' she says. 'Unless of course that's what you want.'

'You knew.' Aziz Mama's eyes are still on the road but both his hands are back on the steering wheel, 'It didn't stop you either.'

* * *

We're ambushed by the rain. Bombed, caught out as we open the heavy doors of the car. He says, 'There it is, your heart eater's grave.'

I suppose I couldn't stop thinking about her, ever since Aziz Mama had first told me about her. A girl, a princess no less, who once lived and ate out the heart of a squealing child every night. I close my eyes and try very hard to imagine what it would be like. A red thing, a dark matted spilling thing like those discarded from the corpses of goats strung from their hooves in meat shops. What did they make of her, those people whose children were sacrificed, and what did she make of herself, this monster that lived in the castle? I wondered what stories they told of her. Now she lay in a dark underground crevice, abandoned by her father. I peer into her mausoleum through rusted iron bars, and see mice scampering in my shadow, skittering among cobwebs.

In the beginning I would take the Pygmy peace-offerings. I wanted to belong, to have other mothers allow their children to play with me, watch TV together. I stole small things, hid them in my clothes, and took it to the field by the swings. Plastic animals, erasers that smelled like rubber strawberries, bars of chocolate. The leader looked at them in disdain, but accepted them anyway. I came like a fool, supplicant, smiling, and took out treasures out of the folds of my flesh and was allowed to join the play.

Ma and Aziz Mama are standing on the flat red stones of Murshid Quli's mosque, and under its dome a heart eating princess sleeps forever, their prayers washing away her sins. I can hardly see them through the rain. It comes down in a heavy grey curtain, smoking them, blurring them, washing them away. They're standing before the Jafri window, framed in an archway, looking through the laced stone screen. My mother moves closer to him.

In the folktales my grandmother used to tell, often a queen would birth a monkey-child. The story changed with every telling. Sometimes it was a doll made of cream, sometimes an ape-child, mistaken, wrong. Ma would joke, 'When you came out of me, covered in hair and wagging a tail, I said this is not what I wanted at all. A girl, a beautiful girl with the manners of the princess, please, not this monkey-child.' I believed everything she said in those days, and she said, 'I had to return you to Ma Shoshti the baby goddess, and she gave us a different girl, but hey look some of that monkey remained.' In my grandmother's stories sometimes the king would take another wife and send the queen to the wilderness, or he would behead the monkey and her mother. In my dreams their stories opened large maws and sucked the darkness of fairytales.

Inside the car my mother is leaning out of her window, her face turned to the road. The drapes and folds of her sari wilt in the breeze. The booklet flaps between them, its cheap paper limp and blotchy from the rain. I slept, feeling sick from hunger and the sweet water still whirling inside my throat.

When I wake it's only me and Aziz Mama in the car. Only his headlights shine yellow in the dark compound. We watch my mother in silence out in the distance, walking like a palm in a thunderstorm, swaying towards the hostel. 'She's coming down with a fever,' he says. 'Try and call your grandmother, see if she can come. I'm getting late, I…' He stops and turns around to look at me. 'It'll be okay, you'll see.'

I nod. He reaches out to touch my arm. 'Aziz Mama,' I say. 'You'll really give me your grandfather's Ashrafi?'

'The day we go to Hazarduari, the palace with a thousand doors.' He laughs, as if remembering something. 'Only, nine hundred of them are fake.'

The sign above the Trainee Hostel has rusted through the tin, but I can just about see the highway from here. The line of dark grey on which the yellow lamplights drop. On nights I cannot sleep, I listen out for the trucks that go through the night. They have strange horns, long and piercing. It is a greeting. I listen out for them when I can't sleep.

My mother moves like a sleepwalker through the long grass, humming now with insects. I run fast but I'm always behind, till we are both moving through the long dark corridors, the unnerving rows of empty rooms and bathroom cubicles towards a corner room stifling in the stench of fruit.

A crateful of mangoes breathe under my mother's bed. The inaudible buzz of their heat-filled dreams, their sticky sweetness, spread their gummy tendrils through the mattress. Their resin covers her like a fly in amber. My mother looks like a folktale princess, one reeling from the shock of birthing a monkey-child, or a heart-eater, unable to stop. The salt on her skin burns in the fever. All of her is moving away, her forehead, her hands, the back of her neck, into sleep, into fever. I may never know her again, and such is the magic of nightmares.

I find the ripest of them and come outside. Its orange flesh has turned red, ferment-tangy in late June. It drips through my fingers. There will be fat, red ants swarming the drops in a few hours. It's a full moon tonight. I ravage the mangoes one after another. A pool of ant food puddles under my dripping hands.

The moon gleams like an old silver coin, writing curled on its back.

Rijula Das's debut novel 'A Death in Sonagachhi' will be published in December by Picador India. Next week's short story is by Witi Ihimaera.
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