Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

these latter stories was whether they were about Rose or some other character, usually Janet, a writer (though at the suggestion of the
New Yorker
when “The Moons of Jupiter” was published there, she also appeared as a painter). Writing to Huber in her first May 19 letter, Munro further weighed various means of arranging the stories and arrived at “a solution very close to what you suggested in the first place. That is, a
Rose
section with all the stories that go so well together about Rose: Royal Beatings, Privilege, Grapefruit, Swans, Spelling, Beggar Maid (the position of
Spelling
is a bit of a problem). Then, a
Janet
section, withChaddeleys & Flemings, Mischief, Providence, Moons of Jupiter and a story I’m just finishing now, called ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ This makes two almost equal parts.” Macmillan wanted to use “Accident” set between the two sections and leave out “Simon’s Luck.”
    When she wrote Huber again on May 19 she sets the Macmillan “Rose and Janet” structure out on a page, schematically indicating arrangement: first Rose stories in third person (arranged as above the first time), “Accident” in the middle, then the first-person Janet stories (“Chaddeleys and Flemings,” “Who Do You Think You Are?” “Mischief,” “Providence,” “Moons of Jupiter”). Munro also tells her that she has sent her a revised version of “Simon’s Luck,” now in the first person but, after she had sent it, she decided to redo it as a Rose story in third person and so encloses it, asking Huber to copy it and send a copy to Gibson, giving her his address. At that point she saw it as replacing “Accident.” 31
    Apart from Munro’s inborn striving to achieve a satisfactory form for each of her stories, what all these changes indicate is a writer unusually willing to experiment with the shape her book is taking. She was also listening and responding to her editors’ reactions. Because she was dealing with two editors, each of whom was responding differently to the book’s various possibilities, Munro was moving throughout 1978 toward two very different books.
    For its part, Macmillan pressed ahead. At Munro’s suggestion, Gibson had arranged for Audrey Coffin, by then retired from McGraw-Hill Ryerson but still living near Toronto, to copy-edit Munro’s book. Gibson’s suggestion of “True Lies” as a title to replace “The Beggar Maid” did not succeed with Munro; for a time it looked as if the book would be called “Rose and Janet.” That title was met within Macmillan by general “disgust and dismay”; one person there called it “about as exciting as toad shit on a warm rock.” Following Munro’s own suggestion, they decided on
Who Do You Think You Are?
She characterized that story, which she had just completed, as “slight but important” and suggested further that, as the title story, it “could come at the very end.” Coffin delivered the copy-edited manuscript at the end of the first week of June. Within a week
Who Do You Think You Are?
went into Canadian production.
    Just as that happened, Gibson was writing a letter to Virginia Barber – his first, actually – that began “Mea culpa.” On June 9 a concerned Barber had written to him,
    I’m extremely unhappy with you and Macmillan. We are hearing from U.S. scouts about a book by Alice Munro called
Who Do You Think You Are?
which is to be published in the fall. We do not have a contract with you, and neither the American publisher nor I has heard that title. I’m sure you’ve discussed this with Alice, but she has an agent for good reasons. One of them is to have a central place where all the information about her work is collected. That’s this office, and never do I want a repetition of the past where her works were sold abroad without her knowledge or consent, where different houses were working at cross purposes for the same volume, and so on. Please send us the contract and some information.
    In his reply, Gibson was at pains to satisfy Barber on every point she raised and to describe in some detail just how he and Alice had been working together on the shape of
Who Do You Think You Are?
He wrote that the contract should be arriving momentarily if it had not already, that he and Alice had been on the phone a great deal, and that having weighed the various possible titles, they had decided on
Who
, the title Alice most wanted. He outlined the collection’s structure – it is just as