Lives of Girls and Women
Del Jordan grows up on the outskirts of Jubilee, Ontario, with a mother who sells encyclopedias and a father who farms foxes. Across eight linked chapters Alice Munro follows her from the strangeness of a half-feral uncle to a teenage entanglement with a Baptist boy who tries to baptize her in the river. The book reads as a novel and as a story collection at once, each chapter complete on its own but cumulative in effect. Munro is interested in what girls notice and are not supposed to say, the small acts that decide a life. It is the closest she came to autobiography and the book Strayed names as her favorite.
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What you might want to know about Lives of Girls and Women
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Alice Munro's only novel, a linked story cycle following Del Jordan from childhood to the edge of adulthood in 1940s small town Ontario.
Strayed has named Lives of Girls and Women her favorite novel in interviews and essays, citing Munro's attention to the inner life of a small town girl and the book's refusal to soften its heroine's ambition or sexuality.
Both. It is structured as eight linked stories that follow one narrator, Del Jordan, and works either as a novel read straight through or as standalone chapters.
Lives of Girls and Women was written by Alice Munro, published in 1971 by Vintage.
Lives of Girls and Women is 277 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Lives of Girls and Women takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Lives of Girls and Women is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.