The Emotional Luxury of Successfuly Fleeing

That same issue of the Atlantic has a fine review by Lorrie Moore of Alice Munro's Runaway. Moore quotes from Munro's earlier work, Lives of Girls and Women:

If we had been older we would certainly have hung on, haggled over the price of reconciliation, explained and justified and prhaps forgiven, and carried this into the future with us, but as it was we were close enough to childhood to believe in the absolute seriousness and finality of some fights, unforgivability of some blows. We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and fight and try to kill each other, various ways, then love some more.

Moore's comment:

Only the very young have the emotional luxury of successfully fleeing. For a young person, a pristine heart untainted by the more damaging forms of forgiveness is still in charge.

Wow.