Central to Alice Munro's writing style is her use of apparently incompatible terms or judgements. These conflicts or tensions sustain Munro's notion of the doubleness of reality. The fusion of disparate terms and ideas gives her prose the denseness and precision characteristic of poetry. Romanticism is challenged, and yet ordinary reality is also undermined. The co-existence of romance and perceived reality is perhaps closer to actual reality. While the distinctions and paradoxes are quite straightforward in Lives of Girls and Women, they become less confident and more ambiguous in Who Do You Think You Are?
