Alice Munro, 92

At 2 am, I woke to a text update about a patient. While scrolling, as I often do, I read the news that Alice Munro, one of my favorite writers, has died. I couldn’t go back to sleep. I sort of expected her passing, the way one does with old people. I knew Tita Alice had been frail these past years. She couldn’t even make it to the Nobel ceremony in 2013. But a part of me wished she would surprise the world with yet another collection of stories. No one else writes like her. You see, I had just been reading her, as I always do. No other modern writer speaks to my consciousness the way she does. Her prose is not elaborate. It is simple, deceptively so. There are no big words. But it is so sophisticated and complex and so well put together that I am always left in awe, even in the rereading. I don’t know what I feel—some sadness that I will not read a new story of hers, but mostly gratefulness for an impressive, moving, and extraordinary body of work that has stretched the limits of the short story, still my favorite form of fiction.