Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

the award ceremony was on the Bravo cable network – she made special mention of Robert Weaver, who was “the reason I kept writing all those years.” “The Giller caps a distinguished career in Canadian letters,” the reporter for the
Toronto Star
opined, continuing that the award “has quickly become the country’s pre-eminent fiction prize.” Certainly that was true about the prize then, and now, but the notion of that first Giller “capping” Munro’s career proved delightfully wrong. When
The Love of a Good Woman
appeared in fall 1998, Munro read that October and claimed it would be her last public reading, indicating she was winding down. But she collected her first Giller and justkept right on writing. Six years later the same reporter, writing about Munro’s appearance as one of the six 2004 Giller nominees closing the twenty-fifth Harbourfront International Festival of Authors, began by reminding readers that Munro had said that 1998 appearance would be her last. Ten days later, Munro made another appearance in Toronto and accepted her second Giller for
Runaway
, the second book since her “last” last public reading in 1998. Receiving the award, Munro told the audience – which now included a national CBC-TV audience – about selling books in Victoria in the 1960s. 1
    Here is Alice Munro in November 2004: harkening back amid the Giller gala to the years when only Robert Weaver and her family knew she was a writer. The years she spent sitting alone in the evenings at Munro’s Books on Yates Street, looking out, thinking about “the rest of the story” when she was not talking to people who had ventured into the store. People who would tell her that they made a point of never reading a Canadian book. Or people, as Munro wrote in “The Albanian Virgin,” who “would browse for half an hour, an hour, before spending seventy-five cents.” Talking to Peter Gzowski in September 2001 about her treatment of sexual attraction in
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
– in the stories “Nettles” and “What Is Remembered” – Munro spoke of
    fantasies that never come true, but do come true in a way and are misrepresented, and how we need those dreams to live by. So I’m still very interested in that sort of thing. I say “still” in that way because I’m very aware of my advanced age and the propriety it should bring or the calm it should bring and I’m always surprised that I don’t feel very different. Ever. You’re the same person at nineteen that you are at thirty-nine that you are at sixty that you go on being in a way.
    They continued to talk, and Gzowski asked Munro about her thinking on death. She replied that she thought of death with more fear when she was forty than she does now. “I don’t have that feeling any more that death will snatch me off before I’ve done what I could do.”In the midst of this answer, Munro offers what amounts to something of a personal summary:
    And also, I think in some ways – not in all ways but in some ways – I’m very satisfied and grateful for my life because I’ve done the work I’ve wanted to do. Not that I’ve done all of it or that I’ve done it as well as I would have liked to have done, but I’ve done what I could do. It was hard for me to see in the beginning how I would ever do that. In fact, I thought it more or less impossible. And this wasn’t just because I was a woman of a certain generation, and a certain form of life to fulfill, it was just that I thought it’s too hard and it will never work out in any way at all. And it has worked out in some way. And for that I am so astonished and pleased.
    After Munro received her first Giller Prize for
The Love of a Good Woman
in 1998, awards and award nominations kept up their steady pace. In early 2001, she received the $30,000 Rea Award for Lifetime Achievement (among previous winners were Richard Ford and, appropriately, Cynthia Ozick and Eudora Welty).
Hateship
was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Award, it was selected one of the best books of the year by the
New York Times Book Review
, it was nominated for the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize and the 2002 Torgi Literary Award in the category of CNIB -Produced Fiction, and it won the third Upper Canada Brewing Company Writers’ Craft Award and was the winner in the Caribbean-Canada region for the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In November 2001, just as
Hateship
was being published,