Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

quoted almost always with warm agreement. It was the only quotation Knopf used on the jacket of its
Open Secrets
and was the lead quotation on McClelland & Stewart’s. Ozick, who had met Munro and read with her in New York when
Moons
was published by Knopf in 1983, had contributed “A Short Note on ‘Chekhovian’ ” to a volume of
The Tales of Chekhov
in 1985. A wide-ranging novelist, essayist, and reviewer, she had been thinking about the Russian master’s stories, his work: “We feel Chekhov’s patience, his clarity – his meticulous humanity, lacking so much as a grain of malevolence or spite,” she wrote. “He is an interpreter of the underneath life, even when his characters appear to be cut off from inwardness.” Ozick concludes that “he teaches us us.” So too Munro, the late-twentieth-century Chekhov.
    Throughout the 1990s the object of this consistent and unstinting adulation mostly just kept doing what she had always done: she wrote, she lived her life. Apart from occasional appearances in print in the
New Yorker
(and very occasionally elsewhere), and in person at a few public events, Munro kept pretty much to herself. During the late 1980s she and Fremlin had begun dividing their time between Clinton and Comox, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island. They were attracted to Comox for its ironic combination of good skiing and milder winters, eventually buying a condominium and spending some portion of the year there ever since. Reaching Comox and then returning home has allowed Munro and Fremlin to indulge one of their great shared pleasures, driving and investigating, back and forth across the continent. They have taken numerous routes for variety and interest’s sake.
    Another pleasure Munro pursued during the 1990s was acting in theatrical fundraisers for the nearby Blyth Festival Theatre. A journalist quoted her speaking of the two productions she had been in: “ ‘In one play – both of them were murder mysteries – I was an aging butstill sexually voracious professor of English,’ she says with a laugh. ‘And in another, I played a lady writer who comes into the library and demands to know if any of her books are available. I
loved
it.’ ” When the journalist asked her why she would do this since she was well known for avoiding publicity connected with her writing, Munro’s response was interesting: “ ‘Well, that’s because I have to be me,’ she says to explain her dislike of such self-promotion. ‘With acting, I love the mask.’ ”
Daniel Menaker at the
New Yorker
, the Mysteries of
Open Secrets
    Munro’s life changed in other ways, too, as the 1990s began and she moved into another phase. As she approached her sixtieth year, her health became more of an issue – just after
Friend
was published, Munro went into hospital for an operation, and during the decade other medical concerns, including some heart problems, were treated. In August 1990 her daughter Sheila married, and in July of 1991 Jenny did as well. Munro became a grandmother when Sheila and her husband had their first son, James, in 1991, and he was followed in 1995 by his brother, Thomas. As it happened, Sheila and her family settled in Powell River, British Columbia – on the mainland just across from Comox, with a ferry route connecting the two – so for part of each year Munro was able to see her grandsons regularly and to watch them grow.
    In the literary world, Munro’s career seemed also to enter a new phase after
Friend
was published. In the fall of 1990 Munro won the $10,000 Trillium Award from the Province of Ontario for that book and, at the same time, Munro and
Friend
were shortlisted for the $40,000 Aer Lingus Irish Times Literary Award; the other nominees were Russell Banks, A.S. Byatt, and John Mickelhern. She did not win that one, but she did win the $50,000 1990 Canada Council Molson Prize for “outstanding lifetime contributions to the cultural and intellectual life of Canada.” In August 1991 Munro was named a regional winner for Canada and the Caribbean of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for
Friend of My Youth
. In May 1994 she received the Order ofOntario and, in 1995, the £10,000 W.H. Smith Award for the best book in the United Kingdom for
Open Secrets
. In September 1995 she received a $50,000 Lannan Foundation Literary Prize, given since 1989 to writers “whose work is of exceptional quality.” While some of these awards were for particular books, there was also the evident