Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

earlier that year for the
New Yorker
and writes that Munro is “still puzzling over why she gave up perfectly good housekeeping and writing time to go to New York in May for that Avedon photo. ‘The next day I met John Updike on the street outside the Algonquin Hotel. He said, “Why did we
do
that?” Neither of us knew.’ ”
    Perhaps not, but Tina Brown’s
New Yorker
photo party, in conjunction with the story of the beautiful red-haired “writer” in the Blyth Hall, captures Alice Munro very well just as
Open Secrets
was going to press. Her stories were compelling in just the ways Menaker and other literary types knew, and in the ways she explained to Gzowski. Munro was well aware of this and, at home in Clinton, still quite grounded: she did rue “housekeeping and writing time.” But equally, too, the sociable and very well-read Munro did not want to miss a party with such an invitation list. Besides, the trip also gave her a chance to seeBarber and Close, and to be in New York. In the course of his description of the
New Yorker
party, Menaker wrote, “Alice Munro felt at home enough to take off her shoes. ‘They hurt,’ she said, ‘so I just took them off.’ She explained that she had worn those particular shoes ‘so I would look taller in the pictures.’ ” The
New York Review of Books
gave David Levine the
New Yorker
picture as the basis of its drawing for its review of
Open Secrets
: there she is, staring right back at the viewer just as she is in the Avedon photograph, making eye contact – they have used that drawing in their subsequent reviews of Munro’s books. In the course of her profile, Ross calls the collection Munro’s “most romantic, and riskiest book yet.” “Risky” was the word Munro used for it herself.
    Barber sent
Open Secrets
to Gibson and Close in November 1993 and, early in 1994 after Munro had stopped to see Gibson in Toronto, they had an order for the stories. The first three – “Carried Away,” “A Real Life,” and “The Albanian Virgin” – had all grown from Munro’s researches into Minnie Rudd and Albania so she saw them as a group. As was usual in the making of Munro’s books, changes were made between the magazine and book publication versions. In one instance, Gibson pointed out that “some of our readers had found the story ‘Open Secrets’ a little too opaque for their taste.” Having heard this from others, Munro responded with this new paragraph characterizing Marian’s relation with her husband just after they have left their interview with Lawyer Stephens: “But Marian stopped him, she clamped a hand down on his. The way a mother might interrupt the carrying on of a simple-minded child – with a burst of abhorrence, a moment’s break in her tired-out love.” In “The Albanian Virgin” – a story that had been tentatively titled “Lottar” by the
New Yorker
and might have also been called “An Albanian Virgin” – Munro reinstated to the book a long passage about Nelson dropped from the serial, telling Close, “I want this ‘life with Nelson’ inserted here, as a present-tense forecast, before he actually appears. (It was this way originally, curse me).” She then wrote the insertion on the proof sheet. And she had the opening scene in the bootlegger’s restored to “Spaceships Have Landed.” The book was designed and set by Knopf but printed separately in Canada and the United States, McClelland & Stewart printing in its largerformat, and, as usual, each publisher used separate dust jackets. Gibson and Munro departed from magic realism with this book’s dust jacket, opting for
Colette
, a “risky” original painting by Jenny Munro. Knopf chose a distant view of Niagara Falls with the book’s title interceding. McClelland & Stewart published its initial printing of 30,000 copies on September 24, Knopf its edition in September, too.
    As with “The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry,” held out of any collection, here too Munro kept a recent story, “Hired Girl,” out of
Open Secrets
. It did not fit in with the rest. Published in the
New Yorker
in April 1994, the story is indeed quite different from those in the collection. Rather than being expansive and indeterminate, “Hired Girl” is reminiscent of Munro’s earlier work; it is based on her experience as a serving girl at a summer home on Georgian Bay when she was in high school. There, the first-person narrator realizes she “didn’t have the grace or