alice munro, and other stuff

If there's anything about Munro's work that prevents me from saying that i love it with all my heart, it would be the unremitting bleakness of her stories. They are all. So. Depressing. Some of them even leave me feeling sick in the soul -- she delves so deeply and with such sharp insight into the darkest of human possibilities. And they get me down in spirit, even as my mind gets on an intellectual high from admiring her craft, her perceptiveness, her ability to cut through all the bullshit and say it like it is.
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Is it not possible to write well, and truthfully, and still to let in some of the light? Why is almost all great literature so. Damn. Depressing? Tolstoy famously said that all happy families are alike, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. i suppose, if you extend that to people in general, the inference is that all happy people are alike, while each unhappy person is unhappy in his/her own way. Which would suggest that writing about happy people, or happy situations in general, may possibly be dead boring; the interest, presumably, is in writing about unhappiness.
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i dunno about that. i think it's actually difficult to write well about happiness, without lapsing into cliche. But writing about happiness asides. What about writing that deals with the difficult things in life -- the pain and suffering that are so undeniable for anyone who even cares to observe what life is really like? Is it possible to write truthfully about suffering, without being depressing, and without trivialising life or being cheesy or simplistic?
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Actually, to be honest, my theory is that Munro's writing is so depressing because she doesn't seem to believe in God. i actually honestly think that life without God, without a belief in God (because if God exists He exists independent of human belief, and so one wouldn't actually be able to live life without God) would be hell on earth. i think Munro's stories give a brief glimpse of hell on earth -- just a glimpse, a sneak peak. Enough for me to know i do not want to live there.
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