Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

her third Governor General’s Award on May 27.
    While all this was in process David Macfarlane met with Munro for his December 1986 profile for
Saturday Night
. There he asserted that
Progress
was the “best collection of short stories – the most confident and, at the same time, the most adventurous – ever written by a Canadian.” Here is his final image of the author:
    In a few weeks’ time she will be interviewed by
The Paris Review
, placing her among many of the writers – Hemingway, Faulkner, Forster, Welty – that she read so avidly when she was a young girl growing up, as someone once put it, on the wrong side of the tracks in Wingham. Now, at a point in time called middle age, she wonders if any of this is relevant to her and to her work. “I was terribly surprised when I began to be almost a popular writer,” she says. “Because I never thought that this would happen. All this acceptance comes as rather a shock to someone so well schooled in surviving without it.”
    To “be almost a popular writer.” Once
The Progress of Love
was published, there was nothing tentative about Munro’s situation, not in Canada certainly and, with that book, nowhere else in the English-reading world either. As Tomalin wrote in the
Observer
, Munro wasnever going to write a blockbuster, but with
The Progress of Love
she had garnered readers and respect much more than sufficient. 28
    The level of acceptance that surprised Munro had been growing through the 1980s. For example, in January 1986 and even before
Progress
hit the bookstores, Munro was an “honored guest,” along with Robertson Davies and Mavis Gallant, at the 48th Congress of PEN International in New York. Like the Writers’ Union, PEN is an organization Munro has supported throughout her career, contributing to it personally and reading at its fundraisers. But during the latter half of the 1980s Munro’s reputation and position achieved a level that it has sustained since. If Richler’s sardonic phrase “World Famous in Canada” had been applied to Munro when she was being interviewed by Harry Boyle in August 1974, it would have been accurate; by the late 1980s it was no longer valid. Judging by the success of
Progress
and the ongoing translation of Munro’s works into other languages, “world famous” worked just fine, at least in literary circles. 29
“Countless, Vivid Shocks of Recognition Between Reader and Writer”:
Friend of My Youth
    While all this was happening, Munro wrote on quietly in Clinton. “I write as I always have,” she told a journalist doing a profile for
Maclean’s
at the time of
Friend of My Youth
. “I sit in a corner of the chesterfield and stare at the wall, and I keep getting it, and
getting
it, and when I’ve got it enough in my mind, I start to write. And then, of course, I don’t really have it at all.” About this time, too, Munro was quoted saying, “I write about where I am in life.” Just where she was continued changing as Munro herself grew older. Changes in perspective, the ability to encompass shifts in time, the capturing of a whole sense of a long life could come alive in a very few pages. And she did write as she always had, spending long periods of time thinking before writing in longhand, and after that moving to the typewriter or, since the late 1990s, the word processor.
    In March 1985 Munro sent a remarkable letter to John Metcalf – remarkable for its reflection of herself and the way her mind works. She was writing while travelling “On-the-Bus-Between-Mitchell-and-Stratford … to Toronto to do a Journal interview about Bob Weaver.… Will I wear earrings? I don’t know yet.” She then wrote that she would look around for some nice ones, which will have to be “screw-on or clip-on because I once had my ears pierced but they aren’t anymore.… Do you have to know all this? I guess not. Earrings will keep me from thinking what twaddle I’m going to say.”
    Bob Weaver had been asked to take early retirement, so the CBC news magazine,
The Journal
, was interviewing her for that occasion. The image of Munro on the bus is interesting. Not mechanically inclined, she has never learned to drive, despite attempts by her father, Jim Munro, and Gerry Fremlin to teach her. So the bus and the train have been her usual conveyances about Ontario. Later in the letter, Munro updates Metcalf on two of her daughters. “I think my kids are in a time warp,” she reported.
    There’s a lovely new