Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

restoring its cuts.)
    The Canadian edition of
Love
was published in late September, the U.S. in November. Gibson was especially keen to ensure exact timing on a late September publication date to meet the deadlines for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s prize – he wrote to Close in mid-May about this, saying that he was “confident that Alice will win this year – perhaps even be a double winner. So the stakes are high here for our getting the book out in September.” This was true enough but, beyond prizes, Gibson expected
Love
to take a large step up in Canadian sales – it did, for by June 1999 there had been five printings of about 60,000 copies. Munro’s advance on Canadian earnings for the book had gone to $70,000. The book’s Canadian dust jacket illustration was Paul Peel’s
Le repos
while Knopf used a vintage photograph (1920s or 1930s) of a man paddling a woman in a canoe.
    While the book was in production during the spring and into the summer, Munro was feeling poorly – heart problems were vexing her by this point. Both in 1997 and again in 1998, Greg Gatenby, director of the Harbourfront writers series, sought to arrange a tribute to Munro as Harbourfront Author of the Year. She turned it down the first time. Early the next year Gibson raised the possibility once more with Barber, who reported back in early March that Munro had again refused, this time explicitly for health reasons since the nervousness brought on by such events took a real toll. As things turned out, though, Munro agreed to a dual reading with Jack Hodgins (who also had a Gibson book that fall) to cap the Harbourfront series on October 31. It was the second time Hodgins had read with her in this way and, once again, she upstaged him – not by anything she did but by simply being the person and writer she is. “Last night,” a newspaper account reported, “1,200 people rose to their feet in a standing ovation for what Alice Munro says will be her final literary public appearance. ‘Absolutely my last reading,’ she had said earlier over dinner.…” Munro said she had told Gerry Fremlin as much when he drove her to the train that morning, and he claimed to have “heard that before.” The reporter setHodgins’s work and his reading early in her article but admitted that “Munro, three-time Governor-General’s Award winner and the front-runner for the Giller prize” to be announced that week “was the big draw.” Not exempted by sitting on its jury this time, Munro and her book did win the Giller but, amid some controversy,
The Love of a Good Woman
was not even shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. Munro and
Love
did, however, win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in the United States, making her the first native-born Canadian to do so. (Illinois-born Carol Shields had won the award previously, as had Toni Morrison, Jane Smiley, and Frank McCourt, among others.) 13
    McClelland & Stewart published a poster promoting
The Love of a Good Woman
, which included this quotation from “The Children Stay” under a picture of Munro: “So her life was falling forward, she was becoming one of those people who ran away. A woman who shockingly and incomprehensibly gave everything up. For love, observers would say wryly. Meaning, for sex. None of this would happen if it weren’t for sex.” Pauline’s moment here, her life-changing decision to leave her husband, Brian, and their children for what turns out to be a short-term fling, does embody the sorts of moments Munro creates and contextualizes in
Love
. Returning for a second Munro review in the
Globe and Mail
, A.S. Byatt begins by asking, “Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents?” She then writes briefly of Munro’s early work, noting that in
Love
Munro “seems to be looking” at her characters’ lives “from further away. The lovingly described human lives come and go in flashes, punctuated by disaster.” Byatt then methodically works her way through some of the stories, noting that in both titles “Rich as Stink” and “The Children Stay,” “the phrase is brisk, colloquial and perfectly natural. In both cases, as part of Alice Munro’s precise and subtle writing, the phrase resonates, morally and esthetically, throughout its story.” “The children stay,” Byatt wrote, “is a perfect example of ambiguity.” As it embodies what happened to Pauline, as it