Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

and contradictory act.” Although it is offered as a story, the author nevertheless keeps stepping onto the page to comment on what she has just written, thus breaking the illusion that this is fiction. All these stories – “Material,”“Winter Wind,” “Home,” and “The Ottawa Valley” – show Munro analyzing both the morality and the efficacy of what she was doing as a writer of fiction. As she wrote in “Winter Wind,” “I feel compunction.” While “Material” offers a more detached analysis of the writer’s position, one written from behind the guise of the persona of Hugo Johnson’s first wife, the other three are about as close to the bone as a writer might get. Each of them is patently autobiographical, drawing on verifiable family relations, and poised on the dotted line between imaginative fiction and what Munro called “true incident.” Understood within Munro’s own life experience, these stories detail the artistic crisis her return to Ontario brought her: read along with these other stories, the endings of “Home” and “The Ottawa Valley” sound like farewells to fiction because that might well have been what they were intended to be.
    While critics have analyzed Munro’s 1973 metafictional stories largely in technical terms, a more compelling rationale for her narrative experimentation lies in her biography: as the writing of “Home” in little more than three weeks demonstrates, Munro returned to Ontario to find it a place she could no longer imagine from far away in distance and time. It was real and immediate, both the place she remembered from her childhood and adolescence and alive in the present moment. Looking at Wingham as she travelled to the hospital with her sick father over the 1973 Thanksgiving weekend, Munro comments in “Home” that the town “has faded, for me. I have written about it and used it up. The same banks and barber shops and town hall tower, but all their secret, plentiful messages drained away.” The messages Munro had imagined from Wingham when she was writing in British Columbia were borne of memory and distance.
    By the end of 1973, when she completed the stories that were to make up her third book, Munro had in a significant way written herself out. She had returned to material she had set aside or long thought about and salvaged what she could as stories. This process had the effect of a reminiscence, since Munro looked again at things she had written years previously, or had been mulling over for some time, and had taken from them what she could. This doubtless took her back to her years of frustration and depression over the numerousstories begun with hope and expectation but then abandoned. Other stories, inspired by more recent personal circumstances and incidents like “Tell Me Yes or No,” “The Spanish Lady,” “Memorial,” or “Forgiveness in Families,” were, like those salvaged from her attempts at novels, essentially exercises and not, in the language Munro later used to characterize her more valued stories, “the real material.” Speaking to Tim Struthers in 1981, Munro saw “The Ottawa Valley” and “Material” as the best stories in the book, “And ‘Winter Wind’ isn’t too bad either.” In the same interview, she mentioned “Home” as “sort of a final statement … about dissatisfaction with art” and said also that with
Something
she “was certainly trying hard with this book,” she “
was
trying something very new” but had since become dissatisfied with what she did there.
    Munro’s dissatisfaction with the stories that were in
Something
was not altogether retrospective, however. Just before she wrote “Winter Wind,” “The Ottawa Valley,” and “Home,” Munro commented to Metcalf that she was dissatisfied with what she had finished for the book, and through January 1974 she reiterated this feeling, complaining that she did not feel connected to that material. Yet despite her misgivings about her right to do what she was doing with the autobiographical material in the three stories she wrote toward the end of 1973, Munro had through them embarked on a new direction. Wingham remembered from British Columbia was, in fact, “used up” but, as “Winter Wind,” “The Ottawa Valley,” and especially “Home” demonstrate, Munro’s return there to stay had brought about a new and sharper quality to her reminiscence: quite literally as 1974 began, Munro was home as she wrote