Who Do You Think You Are

said to myself something as seemingly innocuous yet somehow as affected as “half a grapefruit” hundreds of times since enrolling at that university.
    I thought, “My God, I wonder who these people think I am. I wonder what sort of place they think I came from.” Or rather “come from.” For that was an important distinction, and one of the discoveries of Rose in the book—that your hometown is not a place of the past but forever one of the present, a place that you are forever coming from.
    Years later, after I was at least no longer consciously using the grapefruit test even if, as I suspect, I was still using it at some subconscious level, I witnessed a girl implicate herself exactly as Rose had done in that fictional classroom in Hanratty. I have never seen life imitate art so nearly exactly.
    I was part of what is called a running clinic. People who like to run long distance received instruction from a proven marathoner, the clinic instructor. The instructor asked clinic members to speak up about what they ate before a race. Amidst shouts of such safe choices as “Cheerios” and “pop tarts” the girl shouted, as if she was sure this was the right answer, “hot oatmeal.”
    Even before the snickering started, even before it became customary to whisper “hot oatmeal” whenever the girl appeared in class, I knew what she was in for. It was as though Rose from “Half a Grapefruit,” Rose from Hanratty, had somehow turned up in my marathon clinic. I made a point of befriending and running with this girl, I suspect more for my sake than for hers. I wanted to assure myself that I was not like the girls of Hanratty who teased Rose because of the way she answered the simple question “What did you have for breakfast?”
    Alice Munro’s stories are universally admired if one defines the universe as that part of the world’s population that reads good books. Urbanites from birth who grew up and still live in places like New York, Chicago, London, and Paris love her stories. But I have always wondered if anyone quite gets her stories the way that readers who grew up in small towns do.
    To amend Tolstoy’s opening sentence of Anna Karenina, “Everyone is self-conscious but each person from a small town is self-conscious in their own way.” I think, as the title suggests, that Who Do You Think You Are? is about self-consciousness, not only of the sort one feels when being closely scrutinized but of the sort one feels in the most squirm-inducing moments of self-examination, moments when you are able to imagine, or think you are able to imagine, how you are regarded by others.
    I grew up in a place smaller than a small town, the Goulds, which people forever mistake as “the Ghouls,” perhaps because I still lazily pronounce the name the way I did when I lived in the Goulds and assumed that everyone had heard of it. It was not a town in the sense that any of Alice Munro’s towns are towns, not even a township, just several dozen houses strung out as far apart from each other as telephone poles.
    In “Wild Swans,” as Rose is leaving Hanratty for the first time in her life (she is on the train to Toronto which she will briefly visit, then go back home) she reflects: “There was no snow left, down here. The trees and bushes seemed to have a paler bark than they did at home. Even the sunlight looked different.” When I first read that, I knew that I was blessed, by circumstance of birth, to get Alice Munro’s stories as only someone from a small town could get them. I had had just such a dual realization of the uniqueness of the minutiae of the Goulds and the cramped, closeted boundaries of my existence. Years later, in my novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, I would write of one of the book’s main characters, Joey Smallwood, upon his first leaving Newfoundland: “It was as if the definitions of all the words in the dictionary were expanding at once.”
    I really do squirm when I read Alice Munro. I have all sorts of visceral reactions—moments of recognition so profound that I have to stop reading and walk around to clear my mind or catch my breath. Sometimes the recognition is literal. The eponymous story, “Who Do You Think You Are?,” is largely about a small-town misfit, an oddball who in the Goulds of my childhood would have been deemed “retarded,” that being the umbrella word for anyone whose personality was marred or disordered regardless of how it had got that way. Milton Homer,