The “perfectly secret story”: Re-Reading “Goodness and Mercy” by Alice Munro

This contribution reflects on the personal experience of revisiting texts by Alice Munro, including the feelings of intimacy between the reader and the writer they induce. Every new reading uncovers potential meanings that the critic has overlooked previously, or that may be re-evaluated in the changing context of lived experience. Building on Charles E. May’s analysis of secrecy as a generic characteristic of short fiction, it goes on to examine a critically neglected story from Friend of My Youth (1990). Set during a transatlantic crossing, “Goodness and Mercy” includes many of the motifs that pervade this collection, such as the mother-daughter relationship, terminal illness and the power of fantasy. Munro parodies the tropes of popular fiction, including the shipboard romance, crime fiction and the spy thriller, ultimately asserting the primacy of the inner life, the “perfectly secret story” the protagonist constructs for herself. The text as a whole is a secretive story, withholding information from the reader but also encrypting clues through multiple intertextual references and the imagery of breath, voice and the microphone.