Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Secrets
and Davies’s novel,
The Cunning Man
, in a Harbourfront Reading Series canvas book bag. Munro was to follow this up with two other events in Toronto at the end of October and early November and, once she was in Comox, read as part of the Vancouver International Writers Festival on February 5.
    On November 2 Munro was scheduled to attend the first presentation of the Giller Prize, a $25,000 prize for Canadian fiction established in 1995 by Jack Rabinovitch to honour his late wife, Doris Giller. Along with Mordecai Richler and University of Ottawa professor David Staines, Munro served as a juror to choose the first recipient. Munro credited Staines’s powers of persuasion (once saying it was a good thing he did not want her to be a drug runner) but it was widely thought she agreed so that
Open Secrets
would not be eligible, and so was not the first winner. M.G. Vassanji’s
The Book of Secrets
won, but Munro, who served only on the inaugural jury, went on to win the prize in 1998 for
The Love of a Good Woman
and, in 2004, for
Runaway
. That Munro was sought out for the first jury is an apt illustration of just how she was seen as Canada’s major author. Along with Richler’s, her presence on the jury gave the Giller Prize immediate prominence.
    Owing to illness, Munro was not able to attend the first Giller presentation – though in January 1994 she had attended the gathering for the prize’s public announcement where, Staines recalls, she was the only person the press wanted to speak to. On that same trip, she met with Gibson and they agreed on the ordering of the stories in
Open Secrets
. By the time the prize was awarded, her book was in the bookstores and selling extremely well. In January 1995 Gibson wrote Munro that “by the end of the year”
Open Secrets
had “ ‘sold’ 33,000 copies in the bookstores, with a further 3,500 going to the Book of the Month Club.” Gibson put “sold” in quotation marks because he knew there would be some returns, “but our sense is that by the end of the day
Open Secrets
is going to have sold over 30,000 copies in Canadian bookstores, which is an astonishing achievement for such a fine literary work that contains not one single car chase or attempt to over-throw the U.S. Presidency.” (The final sales figure in Canada was much better than he expected: 38,530 with another 7,070 through the Book-of-the-Month Club.)
Open Secrets
was moving well in the United States too, given its presence on the
New York Times
bestseller list and, in the same letter, Gibson congratulates Munro on the W.H. Smith Award in Britain “given to the best book of the year, fiction, non-fiction or poetry, so the honour is all the greater for that.” Beyond prizes, it is worth noting, too,that as it was published in English
Open Secrets
had been or was being translated for publication into French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Spanish. Most of her previous books offered a similar list of translations;
Friend of My Youth
was not in Norwegian, but it was in Danish, Dutch, Japanese, and Swedish. By 1996 Munro’s work had been translated into thirteen different languages. 6
Making
Selected Stories
    In its May 1994 issue
Books in Canada
published an article, “In Search of Alice Munro” by David Creighton, which suggests how Munro was being seen in Canadian letters just before
Open Secrets
was published. Neither a profile nor a review, the piece is based on Creighton’s excursion to Wingham, Clinton, and Blyth to look at Munro’s home place for himself, to identify the places she had described, to make contact with some people in Wingham who remembered her living there. The article is illustrated with photographs: Wingham’s town hall, the family home, the Maitland River, the Lyceum theatre, a monument to the Huron Tract pioneers, a coffee shop, the former post office now the museum, the Wingham branch of the Royal Canadian Legion. By the 1990s literary types were talking about something called “Munroviana” (in Creighton’s article it is “Munrovia”) and, more widely, people were beginning to refer to Huron County as “Alice Munro Country.” Like Hardy’s Wessex, Cather’s Nebraska, Faulkner’s Mississippi, or Laurence’s Neepawa, Munro’s Huron County was being seen as a mythic place, a literal place made magical by its rendering in Alice Munro’s fiction. Creighton’s article is indicative of as much. Its impulse was furthered in 2000 by the creation of a