In "An Ounce of Cure," Alice Munro (665) describes a seminal event in the life of a teenage girl in a small, insular town where everyone knows everyone's business. The narrator of this short story falls in love with a student named Martin Collingwood but their brief relationship ends when he drops her for another girl who plays opposite him in the class play based on Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice. While babysitting, the narrator begins to drink alcohol and becomes not only drunk, but ill. It is a disaster from start to finish and eventually the entire town knows not only that the narrator was drunk, but appears to have attempted suicide because of Collingwood's rejection. In this story, a first thwarted love affair leads to a first hangover and the long-term consequences of having one's deepest emotions exposed to an entire town.
Munro's narrator begins her story by noting that "my parents didn't drink" and going on to identify her nature as causing her mother "to look at me, on any occasion which traditionally calls for feelings of pride and maternal accomplishment... with an expression of brooding and fascinating despair" (665). Even before the narrator falls from grace after being found drunk while babysitting, she is aware of the fact that her mother does not expect that her life will follow the typical trajectory involving "orchids, nice boys, diamond rings" (665). Instead, this young woman will be judged by her parents on the extent to which her disasters are minimal rather than extravagant.
The disaster which occurs when the narrator babysits for the Berrymans is of epic proportions. She does not know how to drink and therefore mixes rye whiskey and scotch together and consumes two large glasses immediately, filling the bottles with water in hopes that the Berrymans would not notice. The inevitable result is immediate and extreme drunkenness followed by violent nausea. Although the narrator's frie...