I liked Barbara as a character because she reads of course but also because when Murray suggests that her brother might need counselling her reply was “Maybe he needs to be hanged.” Pretty straight forward kind of gal!

“She had found that she was usually optimistic in the morning but that panic was a problem at dusk.”

and this, “It had to do with a falling-off of purpose, and the question why am I here?”

This story also reminded me of the statement in the previous story when Almeda “has noticed about married women…how many of them have to go about creating their husbands.” Helen is not creating Jack so much as following up some of what she knew about him and connecting with a world he knew and a time he valued. Mostly though, I believe, she is looking for something quite different.

And what about the title? Which characters do the words represent?

With regard to the woman sitting in a corner with her notebook, there is a quote in Robert Thacker’s biography of Alice Munro from a journalist doing an interview for Maclean’s at the time of Friend of My Youth: “I sit in a corner of the chesterfield and stare at the wall, and I keep getting it, and getting it, and when I’ve got it enough in my mind, I start to write. And then, of course, I don’t really have it at all.” Thacker also gives another quote from the same time period: “I write about where I am in life.” This might be why Helen Curtis feels like someone the reader knows rather well.

It hadn’t occurred to me, until you’d pulled out these bits, that the commentary is actually so revealing of the person who is interpreting as well, who can observe that Meda wasn’t loaded down with work and children (so, perhaps, the observer is not, either). The comment about all the reading also brings to mind Barbara in “Oranges and Apples”, the way that she is always, always reading and doesn’t seem to want to do anything else. And, yes, I hrumphed in recognition of the “creating their husbands” line: how often do we observe (and, at times, perhaps, participate in) just that!

I love spotting the overlap with Goderich in this collection, in “Oranges and Apples” the talk of the bandshell in the square and the stairs to view the sunset, and in “Five Points” with the cars parked at the shore to look out at the lake and the freighters coming and going, and in the mentions of the salt mine (more than one story IIRC).

There is a photograph of Eloise A. Skimings here. And the fact that her book was Golden Leaves and the book in the story has golden lettering on its cover makes me think that AM was winking indeed.