Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

don’t feel a big commitment to’ ” these stories. This comparison is problematic, Lesser says, because in
Open Secrets
“Munrois venturing into new terrain: the terrain of the fantastical, the psychologically introverted, the purely suppositional.” She continues in a passage that gets right to the heart of Munro’s transformation:
    No story in
Open Secrets
has the intense visceral solidity of most of Munro’s earlier work, the feel and texture of experienced reality evident in her partly autobiographical novel,
Lives of Girls and Women
, and in collections such as
The Progress of Love
and
The Moons of Jupiter
. These days she is no longer remembering, but guessing or imagining; and her material tends now to be the history of others – researched or overheard, contemplated, explored, added to – rather than her own immediate personal history.
    Lesser is overstating her case, but she has apprehended just the shift Munro spoke of to Gzowski and which is apparent in
Open Secrets
. Writing these stories, Munro was still very much remembering, but those memories come largely in the details. The cores of these stories lie, as Lesser rightly asserts, in the guessing and the remembering. Lesser also notices a telling incidental appearance of Louisa’s daughter, Bea Doud – the central character in “Vandals” – in “Carried Away.” Quoting the passages in question, she asks what amounts to a crucial succession of questions about Munro’s narrative technique: “Who is telling us this, and what is her relation either to us (the audience) or Bea (the actor)? Can we trust her on things? Is something being kept from us? Is there a verifiable truth here, or is someone just imagining it all?” All fair questions, though largely unanswerable ones. As Marlene Goldman and Teresa Heffernan wrote in “Letters in Canada 1994” in the
University of Toronto Quarterly
, “Often just as the narrative reaches its climax, promising to explain the life of the character or the logic of a dramatic event, it quickly recedes, retracting its promise; the event quietly fades, swept up in a blur of new events and buried by the future.”
    Julia O’Faolain in the
Times Literary Supplement
also notes that several of Munro’s “new stories here pivot on reality’s slipperiness – in the light of which, realism can only be a convention and a willeddistortion. All the better, we may feel, since it is by distorting that writers share their vision. It is for the distortion that we read. Besides, Alice Munro does not impose her views, but leaves us wondering.” Closing her review in the
Canadian Forum
, Myrna Summers surveyed
Open Secrets
and Munro’s work more generally and wrote that “we read her with exhilaration, whatever her subject, and a hundred years from now, I believe that there will be every bit as much reason to read her work as there is to read Chekhov today.” 5
    The focus of all this, the writer herself, missed most of these kudos since, for the first time, she decided not to read the book’s reviews. She told Gzowski that she had heard that Doris Lessing never saw her reviews and decided “to try it this time.… I thought I’d experiment to see what it did for my mental health.” However busy and otherwise directed she was, seeing and hearing about her reviews worried her and put her off her day. So while others told her about some of the reviews of
Open Secrets
, Munro ignored them and went on living her life.
    As had then become her custom, Munro limited her engagements to three or four events surrounding the book’s publication. She went on
Morningside
on September 30 and, on October 7, read along with Robertson Davies at a gala celebration of the two pre-eminent writers published by Douglas Gibson Books. The reading was sponsored by the Harbourfront Reading Series and McClelland & Stewart and was held in a thousand-seat auditorium at the North York Performing Arts Centre. A press announcement from the reading series asserted that this “historic literary event … marks Alice Munro’s first public reading in Toronto in five years, and her only Toronto appearance this year.” The
Toronto Star
ran a story on the reading calling Munro and Davies “two of the country’s most beloved authors” and noting that they were reading together “for the first time in their careers.” While regular tickets were $20 and $15, for $100 seventy-five people got a preferred seat and signed copies of
Open