Post #3 Happy Endings By Margaret Atwood

I liked this short story because it dissects a lot of other short stories. It organizes them into the different categories of story telling. I liked the very last lines when she states that most stories just state what happened and that an interesting story talks about how and why. Its very different formatting from other stories, especially vignettes. I thought that it was kind of dark in the sense that it brought up suicide attempts and a lot of killing but i guess that is the real world and real writers do not shelter its readers from the real world.
I thought that the happy ending (A) seemed a little more old fashioned than the rest of the endings but, ending A is actually the ending of all of them so no matter what, you end up in the happy ending with someone in some way with a few things changed here and there. She stated that the lives of people in stories all follow the same format and no matter how crazy and brutal and awful you make their lives, they will find their way to ending A.
I liked the story a lot even though it told a couple different stories, I thought that the idea was interesting and it made me read more slowly and more carefully because i spent time sorting through how she wrote everything down.

My alternate ending:
John meets Mary.
Mary has 3 boyfriends that are all basically the same age as her, 23. John, Aaron, and Joseph. John and Mary meet on mondays and Wednesdays because John thinks she goes to night school all other nights and works as a lawyer during the day. She does neither of those things. Aaron and her meet on the weekends because she likes him the best but she, under no circumstances, loves any of them. Joseph and her meet during tuesdays and thursdays and most of the time during the day. Mary's habits of being with more than one man at a time stems from her lack of father daughter time as a child. These things tend to all fall down at once and never end well. John finds out about Joseph and is heartbroken, he planned to propose that monday night but instead, he jumped from the tourist attraction bridge. Mary found Aaron with another girl and was crushed, she felt hypocritically betrayed and realized that only Joseph was left. She was not in love but she was desperate so she proposed to him later that week. They live out ending A with different names and a slightly more depressed aura.