Alice Munro passed away on May 13th, 2024 at 92, in Port Hope, Ontario, Canada. I finished writing My Wife's Letters that April. Much of the story is in debt to her work, which, since chatting about it with my English teacher Mr. Reynolds in the hospital beds of Haliburton Forest, Ontario in 2018, has expanded my imagination of what stories were capable of. She is, in my view, the greatest origamist of the inordinate ordinary life.
The summer of 2024 I organized an Alice Munro reading group. A month into reading her stories (I particularly liked rereading Friend of My Youth), and two months after her death, Munro's daughter revealed that she was sexually assaulted by Munro's second husband. Alice Munro, discovering the abuse a decade later, stayed with her husband.
I had faith for a long time that better writing made you a better person. My faith was normative, which means I wasn't exactly miscalibrated about reality. The blow was no less harsh, however. My taste in writing fiction was essentially Munronian, an anatomic dissection of the human condition in restrained prose that, at times, read like revelation. Now it turns out understanding humans this well didn't also train courage.
Since then, I have mostly focused on AI Safety: I think the AI trajectory going wrong has a serious chance of impeding the possible goodness we can achieve in the future, and I have channeled much of my same faith into this work. At school I studied some beautiful math and read a ton of Kant. I have been rather happy with my work and intellectual life.
I have not written fiction since 2024. I have read very little fiction—until this July. My favourite book since 2024 is probably Kant's First Critique. I suspect that if I get back to writing stories, I'd write something quite different. I'm not in a rush to return to it.