Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

reason given (and there are too many reasons given in this book, too few admissions that a character may be reined in close to the page, yet dance beyond the author’s logic) is an effort on the part of the narrative voice to be well-liked; the tone is sycophantic.” In “most of these stories, there is the kind of innocence of tone that can make you grin, but the way you grin at someone else’s charming child: already forgetting.” Striking many of the same notes in the
Minneapolis Star
, Susan Cushman wonders about comparing Munro to Laurence and Atwood, though she thinks Munro “probably will prove that she deserves this status” eventually and continues, “This collection unfortunately lacks the generous sparkle that graced Ms. Munro’s earlier work. Part of the problem seems to be a new ambivalence toward her craft,” which Cushman calls “writerly guilt.” Thus although Munro’s “strong talent still shows through,”
Something
“must be considered the weakest of her books so far.” 28
    However mixed the message Munro received from American reviewers of
Something
, there was no question that it marked her ascent among Canadian writers. A June 1974 profile written for the
London Free Press
to accompany Struthers’s review of
Something
captures Munro at that time, and it warrants attention for the detailed snapshot it provides. Her third book just published, her separation from Jim a fact, her position as Western’s 1974–75 writer-in-residence confirmed, Munro had returned home. Speaking to the paper’s reporter, Joanna Beyersbergen, Munro looks back as well as forward. The profile opens “She doesn’t speak of leaving a husband of 20 years and 12-room housein Victoria, B.C., as though it was a cataclysmic experience.” Nor, Beyersbergen writes, does Munro present herself as a “newly-liberated woman. She talks about it as though she has done nothing very remarkable at all.… Her separation is ‘friendly,’ Mrs. Munro says. ‘We’re not even legally separated.’ ” However Munro then wanted to present the breakup of her marriage, most of this profile is concerned with other parts of her life. Growing up in Wingham (“I had to learn to piece a quilt when I was eight, that was to make my first quilt for my hope chest”; her mother had her “wear blue tunics, which middle-class girls wore, but not girls of Wingham”); conforming to accepted views of marriage (“I felt it was my responsibility to pick up my husband’s socks. I felt like that for 20 years”); motherhood (“I’m just so terribly glad I had my children when I did”); and career (she always wanted to “have the children and write”). Looking back is one thing, looking forward another. Beyersbergen writes that “it was the freedom which accompanies being unattached which was so inviting.” Munro said she likes to cook, but she does not “like having to do things like that all the time. That’s why I think I’ll never live with anyone again.”
    Turning to the way she had been seen in Wingham since she began publishing, and especially since
Lives
, Munro commented that “I tried so hard to be like everyone else. I desperately wanted to be asked to a dance.” But “I wasn’t really so unconventional, just by Wingham’s standards.” She “expected people” in Wingham “to be more put off by the book than they were. Maybe they’re not telling me. I think they react positively to success. Didn’t Elizabeth Taylor say, ‘Success is a great deodorant?’ ” Beyersbergen continues, “When Lives came out in England, Mrs. Munro says, she told her father who is still on the farm that she received good reviews in the London Times and the Manchester Guardian. Her father replied, she says with rumbles of belly laughter, ‘Well, you’ll never get one in the Wingham Advance-Times.’ ”
    Again, this is Munro once she had completed the shift from Victoria to London, once Andrea’s situation was stabilized, once
Something
was out, once Munro had the next year or so planned by way of her appointment at Western. Bob Laidlaw remained ill, so she was travelling to Wingham regularly. The month before this profileappeared, Munro had published in the syndicated
Weekend Magazine
“Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious,” her brief affecting essay about her home place that she wrote with her father’s help. Beyersbergen goes on,
    Her laughter is not mockery; there is unconcealed gratitude that she can go