Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

was an early attempt to reverse her usual technique and literally marry her former marriedlife in B.C. with her new life back in Ontario; dedicated to Jim and offered as a present, the story shows Munro beginning to scrutinize her marriage for meaning in the same way she had long examined her childhood and adolescence. More than this – and the technique would become increasingly evident as
Who Do You Think You Are?
gave way to
The Moons of Jupiter
– Munro accomplished her fictive effects by focusing on such moments as Norah experiences and remembers them years later. Home in Ontario a middle-aged woman (an adult, mother, much-praised writer, her position as daughter still intact at home with her father), Munro, like Norah, looked into the mirror and saw her grandmother’s and her great-grandmother’s faces staring back at her. Being Alice Munro, she also saw her mother’s face and, going home to Wingham from London with some regularity, she saw her father still there. By August 1974 when she talked to Boyle, Munro was emphatically home. In “her mortal anxiety” – and Munro really did believe she might never write another thing – the question was what to do with this home now that she was there.

    Listening to the leisurely talk Boyle had with Munro on
Sunday Supplement
were Munro’s current and future editors – Audrey Coffin and Douglas M. Gibson. Coffin mentioned it in her letter returning the manuscript of
Something
, asking, “Have you noticed how your name keeps cropping up in Canadian book reviews and the like? And always now acknowledged as tops. Tomorrow the world! (Gratifying!!?).” When Gibson wrote, he acknowledged Munro’s rising reputation as well. Citing a detail from the Boyle interview, Gibson agreed with a remark Munro had made about small towns; in his own in Scotland, too, “ ‘even the town loonie’ had his role and was recognized as a character,” as she had said to Boyle.
    After taking a bachelor’s degree at St. Andrew’s University in his native Scotland, Gibson came to North America in 1966 and took a master’s degree at Yale. Then he embarked on a trip throughout the United States and Canada that saw him ending up in Toronto and, after a few months in the administration at McMaster University, answeringan ad for editorial trainees at Doubleday Canada and being hired. Gibson worked there for six years before moving on to Macmillan to be editorial director of its trade division. Writing to Munro, Gibson probably knew that she was not happy at McGraw-Hill Ryerson and in his letter encouraged her to stop by his office if she was in Toronto. Such wooing was very much a part of the trade, both on the part of publishers and authors. Sometime in the fall Gibson travelled to London and met Munro for dinner. By January 1975 Gibson was writing her, “We at Macmillan would like to offer you a contract for your next book of fiction” and, as well, reported in the same letter that “on the other book, I have called Peter D’Angelo and he is sending along a lot of sample material for our perusal.” 34
    Macmillan did not actually succeed in contracting for Munro’s next book until spring 1978 when
Who Do You Think You Are?
was going into production. But as this second letter suggests, Gibson and Munro set to work immediately after their first meeting on a book of photographs, with a text by Munro, focused on Ontario and to be called “Places at Home.” Peter D’Angelo, a medical student at Western and a photographer, had brought the idea to Munro when she was writer-in-residence there and she, in turn, took it to Gibson when they met. He was quite encouraging, so Munro and D’Angelo worked on the project throughout 1975, Munro producing a manuscript of about ten thousand words and D’Angelo spending that summer, supported by the advance he got from Macmillan, driving about southern Ontario taking photographs. The book was never published, but the work Munro did on it was important to her imaginative return to Huron County and much was later incorporated into
Who Do You Think You Are?
    After this book was abandoned in late 1975, Munro’s relationship with Gibson, and so with Macmillan, continued through other connections. Munro wrote a blurb for Jack Hodgins’s first book,
Spit Delaney’s Island
, and she took the manuscript of her father’s novel, completed just before his death in August 1976, to Macmillan. It published Laidlaw’s
The McGregors
in 1979. She was