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Home Truths
A wonderful collection of biting stories by Mavis Gallant, one of the foremost Canadian short story writers of the 20th century.
392 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
19 people are currently reading
381 people want to read
About the author
Mavis Gallant
89 books256 followersCanadian journalist and fiction writer. In her twenties, Gallant worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard. She left journalism in 1950 to pursue fiction writing. To that end, always needing autonomy and privacy, she moved to France.
In 1981, Gallant was honoured by her native country and made an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to literature. That same year she also received the Governor General's Award for literature for her collection of stories, Home Truths. In 1983-84, she returned to Canada as the University of Toronto's writer-in-residence. In 1991 Queen’s University awarded her an honorary LL.D. In 1993 she was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada.
In 1989, Gallant was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, she won the Matt Cohen Prize, and in 2002 the Rea Award for the Short Story. The O. Henry Prize Stories of 2003 was dedicated to her. In 2004, Gallant was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
With Alice Munro, Gallant was one of a few Canadian authors whose works regularly appeared in The New Yorker. Many of Gallant’s stories had debuted in the magazine before subsequently being published in a collection.
Although she maintained her Canadian citizenship, Gallant continued to live in Paris, France since the 1950s.
On November 8, 2006, Mavis Gallant received the Prix Athanase-David from the government of her native province of Quebec. She was the first author writing in English to receive this award in its 38 years of existence.
In 1981, Gallant was honoured by her native country and made an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to literature. That same year she also received the Governor General's Award for literature for her collection of stories, Home Truths. In 1983-84, she returned to Canada as the University of Toronto's writer-in-residence. In 1991 Queen’s University awarded her an honorary LL.D. In 1993 she was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada.
In 1989, Gallant was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, she won the Matt Cohen Prize, and in 2002 the Rea Award for the Short Story. The O. Henry Prize Stories of 2003 was dedicated to her. In 2004, Gallant was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
With Alice Munro, Gallant was one of a few Canadian authors whose works regularly appeared in The New Yorker. Many of Gallant’s stories had debuted in the magazine before subsequently being published in a collection.
Although she maintained her Canadian citizenship, Gallant continued to live in Paris, France since the 1950s.
On November 8, 2006, Mavis Gallant received the Prix Athanase-David from the government of her native province of Quebec. She was the first author writing in English to receive this award in its 38 years of existence.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
October 3, 2012
Mavis Gallant is hands down my favorite author. Now, having read a second collection of short stories by her, I am confident to say-she is my hero-writer. She creates a style of storytelling that moves directly into me like something entering my bloodstream. How often does something like that happen? I find lovely reads all up and down the spectrum which I relate to and linger over and applaud-but, just ever so seldom do I fall completely in love. I jump from one story into the next and I am never disappointed.
I am glad she found her way to Paris and fiction writing. She writes unapologetically about the world and the mundane intricacies of everyday life with wit and great care for her characters-whether they are likable or not. Her perspective is everyday and wholly unique.
Bravo, Ms. Gallant.
I am glad she found her way to Paris and fiction writing. She writes unapologetically about the world and the mundane intricacies of everyday life with wit and great care for her characters-whether they are likable or not. Her perspective is everyday and wholly unique.
Bravo, Ms. Gallant.
September 9, 2019
Beautifully written but awefully dark. Not the whole world is bad. Also I lost the book before reading the last story.
March 19, 2014
Home Truths, Sixteen Stories by Mavis Gallant
Mavis Gallant’s early life conditioned her to know these home truths inside and out. Born in Montreal to an American mother and a British father, she was essentially abandoned at four when she was sent to boarding school. The rest of her childhood was lived without a family.
Therefore, I think it safe to say, the parents in her short stories tend to be incapable of love, neglectful, or just plain stupid. She said this about her mother: “I had a mother who should not have had children, and it’s as simple as that.”
In a 2012 CBC Radio interview, she described her father, a failed painter, as “the great empty chair,” She told The New York Times: “In many, many of the things I write, someone has vanished. And it’s often the father. And there is often a sense that nothing is very safe.”
Her father died when she was only 10. When her mother married again and left Canada, she placed Mavis in the care of a guardian. The little girl always believed her father would eventually rescue come her. Never told that he was dead, she waited for him for several years. She said she never recovered from that grief.
After attending 17 different schools in Canada and the US (she hated every one), Ms. Gallant’s breakthrough came in 1950 when The New Yorker published her first story. Thus encouraged, she challenged herself to surrender herself entirely to her art. She gave herself over to a writer’s life in Paris. This sacrifice meant never marrying again (she had a husband only briefly during her time in Canada, but he was promptly divorced). She never bore children. As a result of her unencumbered and expatriated life alone, she knew how to make us feel intimately familiar with her alienated, dislocated, lonely characters. So displaced herself, she was able to always give us a powerful sense of place, whether the story is set in Montreal, Paris, or Geneva.
Every Gallant short story is a deep meditation. The New Yorker published 116 of her stories for more than 40 years. We subscribers embraced her tales of life’s gentle, cruel, tragic, funny paradoxes. Each one is like an exquisitely detailed needlepoint. Told in exquisite detail, they are threaded with ironies to reveal lives complicated by thwarted dreams.
One of my favorites of the sixteen is “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” a story about two people losing each other. Listen to these randomly selected words from that story:
“Let me,” she said. He was fumbling with the key, trying to lock the car. She took the key without impatience and locked the door on the driver’s side; and then, to show Peter she reassured him and was not afraid of wasting her life on her beauty, she took his arm and they walked in the snow down a street and around a corner to the apartment house where the Burleighs lived. They were, and are, a united couple. They were afraid of the party, and each of them knew it. When they walk together, holding arms, they give each other whatever each can spare.
Or this, also randomly chosen for your ear:
“In a big family, if you want to be alone, you have to get up before the rest of them. You get up early in the morning in the summer and it’s you, you, once in your life alone in the universe. You think you know everything that can happen … Nothing is ever like that again.”
I cannot think of another story teller who could so gracefully evoke with great wit and perception, no sentimentality, the simple lives most of us lead, lives that are in truth scarily complicated … other than, perhaps, her fellow Canadian, Alice Munro. (And I mustn’t neglect Lorrie Moore - Bark: Stories – with her terrific wit and sympathy for her characters.) Yet, Ms. Gallant’s examinations go deeper. In our own lives, we may deny the pain of separation, the risks that come with compassion, the fragility of family relationships, and the frustrating distances that divide us from those we love and need. But reading these incredibly rich stories about strangers made familiar, we are forced to face up to these home truths about our hidden lives.
Although she wrote two novels as well as nonfiction, she much preferred short story writing, saying, “They have a natural size — length, I mean — that arrives with them.” She also said they possess an insistence that lives may be unfulfilling, happiness in love impossible and security a distant dream, yet everything, no matter how grave, holds the possibility for laughter.
“I can’t imagine writing anything that doesn’t have humor,” Ms. Gallant once said. “Look at the fits of laughter that you get at a funeral, at a wake. It’s emotion, and in a way it’s relief that you’re alive.”
Ms. Gallant earned many literary prizes, including the PEN/Nabokov Award in 2004. She died on February 11, 2014, at her home in Paris. She was 91.
Despair not. There is so much more of her to discover, so much more to learn from her. I turn next to The New York Review of Books three collections: “Paris Stories,” 2002 (selected by Michael Ondaatje); “Varieties of Exile,” 2003 (selected by Russell Banks); and “The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories” (2009). I recommend that you do the same.
Mavis Gallant’s early life conditioned her to know these home truths inside and out. Born in Montreal to an American mother and a British father, she was essentially abandoned at four when she was sent to boarding school. The rest of her childhood was lived without a family.
Therefore, I think it safe to say, the parents in her short stories tend to be incapable of love, neglectful, or just plain stupid. She said this about her mother: “I had a mother who should not have had children, and it’s as simple as that.”
In a 2012 CBC Radio interview, she described her father, a failed painter, as “the great empty chair,” She told The New York Times: “In many, many of the things I write, someone has vanished. And it’s often the father. And there is often a sense that nothing is very safe.”
Her father died when she was only 10. When her mother married again and left Canada, she placed Mavis in the care of a guardian. The little girl always believed her father would eventually rescue come her. Never told that he was dead, she waited for him for several years. She said she never recovered from that grief.
After attending 17 different schools in Canada and the US (she hated every one), Ms. Gallant’s breakthrough came in 1950 when The New Yorker published her first story. Thus encouraged, she challenged herself to surrender herself entirely to her art. She gave herself over to a writer’s life in Paris. This sacrifice meant never marrying again (she had a husband only briefly during her time in Canada, but he was promptly divorced). She never bore children. As a result of her unencumbered and expatriated life alone, she knew how to make us feel intimately familiar with her alienated, dislocated, lonely characters. So displaced herself, she was able to always give us a powerful sense of place, whether the story is set in Montreal, Paris, or Geneva.
Every Gallant short story is a deep meditation. The New Yorker published 116 of her stories for more than 40 years. We subscribers embraced her tales of life’s gentle, cruel, tragic, funny paradoxes. Each one is like an exquisitely detailed needlepoint. Told in exquisite detail, they are threaded with ironies to reveal lives complicated by thwarted dreams.
One of my favorites of the sixteen is “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” a story about two people losing each other. Listen to these randomly selected words from that story:
“Let me,” she said. He was fumbling with the key, trying to lock the car. She took the key without impatience and locked the door on the driver’s side; and then, to show Peter she reassured him and was not afraid of wasting her life on her beauty, she took his arm and they walked in the snow down a street and around a corner to the apartment house where the Burleighs lived. They were, and are, a united couple. They were afraid of the party, and each of them knew it. When they walk together, holding arms, they give each other whatever each can spare.
Or this, also randomly chosen for your ear:
“In a big family, if you want to be alone, you have to get up before the rest of them. You get up early in the morning in the summer and it’s you, you, once in your life alone in the universe. You think you know everything that can happen … Nothing is ever like that again.”
I cannot think of another story teller who could so gracefully evoke with great wit and perception, no sentimentality, the simple lives most of us lead, lives that are in truth scarily complicated … other than, perhaps, her fellow Canadian, Alice Munro. (And I mustn’t neglect Lorrie Moore - Bark: Stories – with her terrific wit and sympathy for her characters.) Yet, Ms. Gallant’s examinations go deeper. In our own lives, we may deny the pain of separation, the risks that come with compassion, the fragility of family relationships, and the frustrating distances that divide us from those we love and need. But reading these incredibly rich stories about strangers made familiar, we are forced to face up to these home truths about our hidden lives.
Although she wrote two novels as well as nonfiction, she much preferred short story writing, saying, “They have a natural size — length, I mean — that arrives with them.” She also said they possess an insistence that lives may be unfulfilling, happiness in love impossible and security a distant dream, yet everything, no matter how grave, holds the possibility for laughter.
“I can’t imagine writing anything that doesn’t have humor,” Ms. Gallant once said. “Look at the fits of laughter that you get at a funeral, at a wake. It’s emotion, and in a way it’s relief that you’re alive.”
Ms. Gallant earned many literary prizes, including the PEN/Nabokov Award in 2004. She died on February 11, 2014, at her home in Paris. She was 91.
Despair not. There is so much more of her to discover, so much more to learn from her. I turn next to The New York Review of Books three collections: “Paris Stories,” 2002 (selected by Michael Ondaatje); “Varieties of Exile,” 2003 (selected by Russell Banks); and “The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories” (2009). I recommend that you do the same.
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August 5, 2022My favorites were “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” “Virus X,” “Between Zero and One” and “With a Capital T.”
November 8, 2021
Mavis Gallant should be as well known to literate Canadians as Alice Munro, and yet, because she left Canada for France in 1950 and never returned, she isn't a familiar name. This is unfortunate because her short stories (mostly about women on their own in an unfamiliar environment) are first-rate and unsentimental. I'd been looking for a collection of her work for months (she is next to impossible to find in stores) and happened to stumble upon one in a Little Library. As someone who believes in serendipity I refuse to believe that was a complete coincidence.
I will be rereading this often.
I will be rereading this often.
February 7, 2015
I know, I know. It's MAVIS GALLANT, therefore it's brilliant. And it might have been. I just couldn't get into it. The characters were unrelatable, the plots either convoluted or boring, the language mediocre. I didn't like it, and it pains me to admit that. I've read other of Gallant's work, and enjoyed it (well, I enjoyed it enough). But this one? I dreaded picking it up, and couldn't wait to put it down. Nothing but relief when I finished. Not for me.
April 29, 2017
Damn, she's good. I highly recommend "The Ice Wagon Going Down The Street,'' in particular.
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August 11, 2020Not many writers could go deeper than this. Felt like Canada's Faulkner for a second, even with the difference in theme. I can't believe it. When the say writing is magic. I can believe it.
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December 31, 2025Another that I must have read first in 1995 (the year of the "comps"). It's interesting to see in these late 1970s stories about second world war Montreal (primarily) so many issues that remain with us in US-Canada relations, international prejudices, internecine prejudices, gender relations, etc. One of her many characters insists that "change is always for the worse"; at the very least, in so many ways, it seems always almost impossible.
October 2, 2024
A wonderful story teller. Precise prose, deeply observant of human nature.
December 27, 2025
The first half of this anthology was breathtaking. I guess the thing that impressed me so much was the sheer craft, where every word, every single aside, contributed: clean and beautiful watchwork.
I was so in love I mentioned this book on a workshop application when I was only on the fourth story. I think I said reading it felt like experiencing a magic trick that worked every time, and that still rings true because after every story I would have to sit there, just agog, like "how did she DO this".
That is, until the Linnet Muir run. I hadn't realized that third person had contributed so much to the magic because reading these stories about the same people stuck in the same head kind of dampened my wonder. Even worse, the narration is a retrospective one where Linnet recounts her early days and mixes it with her slightly-later-but-still-early-days, and accompanies remarks and interjections that were simply not that interesting. I missed the warm, invisible narrator from the earlier stories whose observations were not as confident but maybe rung more true. On the whole, the Linnet Muir stories were fine though, I would have been perfectly happy had I read them before the crazy evil showstopping run that was the first half of this book.
I was so in love I mentioned this book on a workshop application when I was only on the fourth story. I think I said reading it felt like experiencing a magic trick that worked every time, and that still rings true because after every story I would have to sit there, just agog, like "how did she DO this".
That is, until the Linnet Muir run. I hadn't realized that third person had contributed so much to the magic because reading these stories about the same people stuck in the same head kind of dampened my wonder. Even worse, the narration is a retrospective one where Linnet recounts her early days and mixes it with her slightly-later-but-still-early-days, and accompanies remarks and interjections that were simply not that interesting. I missed the warm, invisible narrator from the earlier stories whose observations were not as confident but maybe rung more true. On the whole, the Linnet Muir stories were fine though, I would have been perfectly happy had I read them before the crazy evil showstopping run that was the first half of this book.
May 8, 2024
Each story is superbly crafted in their own right, unfortunately by the end common themes such as outsiderhood, disappointment, or keeping face have become repetitive rather than enlightening. The strict adherence to the outsider perspective shared by narrators in most of these stories was particularly damaging to Gallant's ability to deliver truly incisive analysis into Canadian identity, with only a few Linnet Muir stories successfully breaking through the self-imposed barrier.
Best read one at a time over the course of a few months or even an entire year.
Best read one at a time over the course of a few months or even an entire year.
April 13, 2022
I'm not sure how to rate this. Overall, I wasn't super engaged with most of the stories, but there are some incredible lines sprinkled liberally throughout. Like, this is a top 10 short story opening: "He was besieged, he was invaded, by his mother's account of the day he was conceived; and his father confirmed her version of the story, telling him why. He had never been able to fling in their faces "Why did you have me?" for they told him before he could reason, before he was ready to think."
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May 22, 2025Collection of 16 short stories of Canadian author Mavis Gallant “of her countrymen” both home and abroad. Many stories written with an outsiders perspective, with tight prose and attention to the details of the complexities of human nature.
“If you listen at doors, you hear what you deserve.”
“Memory can spell a name wrong and still convey the truth.”
“If you listen at doors, you hear what you deserve.”
“Memory can spell a name wrong and still convey the truth.”
April 24, 2023
Irina was one of my favourite short stories as a teen and I really wanted to re-read Gallant. But I just did not like her characters or her tone. A bit like my reaction to Elena Ferrante, I just was not interested in her world!
June 29, 2025
3.5, honestly, though I'm loath to admit it. This is a re-read from the early 00's and it didn't hold on to me this time. The celebrated Linnet Muir series in particular didn't impress. Should I hold on to the book just in case a third read resonates more?
September 9, 2025
Enjoyed most of these stories. 3 Favourites were:
-Orphan’s Progress
-In the Tunnel
-the Ice Wagon Going Down the Street
At times laugh-out-loud or relatable, true and sad and hardly ever boring (apart from the too-long and fragmented Bonaventure and The Doctor)
-Orphan’s Progress
-In the Tunnel
-the Ice Wagon Going Down the Street
At times laugh-out-loud or relatable, true and sad and hardly ever boring (apart from the too-long and fragmented Bonaventure and The Doctor)
July 28, 2018
Wise, funny, incisive, and sentence for sentence, one of the best stylists around.
November 3, 2024
Overall, maybe a 3.5?
A few stories I quite enjoyed…”Jorinda and Jorindel”, “Virus X”, and “Voices Lost in Snow”.
A few stories I quite enjoyed…”Jorinda and Jorindel”, “Virus X”, and “Voices Lost in Snow”.
November 10, 2018
Pivotal collection in her oeuvre, and a must even for Gallant fans who already have her Collected stories, since over half of the stories in this collection were not reprinted in that book.
August 31, 2008
I gave this book a THIRD chance over the weekend. After plowing my way through the first section of the book I chanced upon Linnet Muir. These stories were authentic and witty. At time I found myself laughing out loud, and enjoyed each story immensely.
Inscription:
p. 364: "nothing 1/2 hearted the truth with a capital "T""
"What is truth?" Pilate asked
"Your word is truth" answered Jesus
What does that answer mean?
My 32 year old brain decided last month that the "T"ruth be it religious, political, journalistic or otherwise is not out there - not for us.
Inscription:
p. 364: "nothing 1/2 hearted the truth with a capital "T""
"What is truth?" Pilate asked
"Your word is truth" answered Jesus
What does that answer mean?
My 32 year old brain decided last month that the "T"ruth be it religious, political, journalistic or otherwise is not out there - not for us.
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April 14, 2019This review was deleted following Amazon's purchase of GoodReads.
The review can still be viewed via LibraryThing, where my profile can be found here.
I'm also in the process of building a database at Booklikes, where I can be found here.
If you read/liked/clicked through to see this review here on GR, many thanks.
The review can still be viewed via LibraryThing, where my profile can be found here.
I'm also in the process of building a database at Booklikes, where I can be found here.
If you read/liked/clicked through to see this review here on GR, many thanks.
April 6, 2009
The introduction hooked me - I knew I was going to love this author. When posing the question "what is a Canadian", she surmises that it must be anyone who has a good reason to believe they are one! Short stories suited my busy life that week and these were great.
April 13, 2012
Just thinking about this book makes me want to read it again.
February 9, 2014
Among the best short stories I've read ever.
April 28, 2016
yawwwwwn, zzzzzz. I kept leaving it, forcing myself to return, boring, couldn't finish it
May 1, 2019
Mavis Gallant, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, who are these women? I am awed.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews