The Office
Cover
Alice Munro
Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published thirteen collections of stories and a novel. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards, including two Giller Prizes, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. In 2013 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, and many other publications, and her collections have been translated into fifty-one languages. She lives in Port Hope, Canada, on Lake Ontario.
Other Titles
ALSO BY ALICE MUNRO
Family Furnishings
Dear Life
Too Much Happiness
The View from Castle Rock
Vintage Munro
Runaway
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
The Love of a Good Woman
Selected Stories
Open Secrets
Friend of My Youth
The Progress of Love
The Moons of Jupiter
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
Lives of Girls and Women
Dance of the Happy Shades
Title Page
The Office
from Dance of the Happy Shades
Alice Munro
A Vintage Short
Vintage Books
A Division of Penguin Random House LLC
New York
Copyright
Copyright © 1968, copyright renewed 1996 by Alice Munro
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Canada as part of Dance of the Happy Shades by the Ryerson Press in 1968, and subsequently in the United States by McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, in 1973.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“The Office” was published in slightly different form in The Montrealer.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for Dance of the Happy Shades is available from the Library of Congress.
Vintage eShort ISBN 9781101912409
Series cover design by Joan Wong
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THE OFFICE
The solution to my life occurred to me one evening while I was ironing a shirt. It was simple but audacious. I went into the living room where my husband was watching television and I said, “I think I ought to have an office.”
It sounded fantastic, even to me. What do I want an office for? I have a house; it is pleasant and roomy and has a view of the sea; it provides appropriate places for eating and sleeping, and having baths and conversations with one’s friends. Also I have a garden; there is no lack of space.
No. But here comes the disclosure which is not easy for me: I am a writer. That does not sound right. Too presumptuous; phony, or at least unconvincing. Try again. I write. Is that better? I try to write. That makes it worse. Hypocritical humility. Well then?