Open Every Window is a genre-bending prose account of the unravelling of a life—two lives—when Jane Munro’s husband Bob is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Evoking Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, this memoir charts a path through sorrow—the pain of seeing a partner age and approach death, the exhaustion of caretaking, and the regret in seeing life’s scope narrow and diminish. Written with courage and love, Munro grapples with what it means to care for a husband who is gradually but devastatingly deteriorating. Her identity as a writer, yoga practitioner, mother and grandmother, are all eclipsed by a single word—caregiver. Even a doctor admonishes, “What job could be more important than caring for your husband?” In this portrait of the myriad lives contained in a single life, Munro ultimately finds respite in the power of writing, and in the rhythms of the moon—not to heal but to allow her to face grief without breaking.

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“Munro’s lyric prose is lit from within. A remarkable memoir, both fresh and graceful.” 
—Jan Zwicky, author of Songs for Relinquishing the Earth


“With characteristic clarity, honesty, and restraint, Jane Munro unveils the extraordinary devotion of women to parents, children, husbands, families, to everyone but themselves. Open Every Window reminds me of Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women as it charts the socialization of girls over a lifetime. When does one yield to expectations? When must one resist? Never a word wasted, never an extraneous detail, Munro reveals the conundrums, self-denial, the invisible labour of women in all their roles. She writes with insider knowledge of the conflicts women face as they try to preserve a life of their own. The lingering beauty of Open Every Window is the revelation that a single life can hold so much more than one life.”

— Ian Williams, author of Reproduction


“Jane Munro's memoir is a jewel: spare, bright, and sharp, effortlessly elegant, and illuminated by love’s many facets.”
—Annabel Lyon, author of Consent