Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

They talk about those days, and she concludes the matter, writing, “I was happy to find somebody who could see me still in my family, who could remember my father and the place where my parents lived and worked all their lives, first in hope and then in honourable persistence. A place astonishingly changed now, though the house is still there.” When she talked to Mona Simpson andJeanne McCulloch in Clinton in 1993, at a second meeting to complete the interview they began in 1983, Munro remarked, “The material about my mother is my central material in life … and it always comes the most readily to me. If I just relax, that’s what will come up.” In keeping with this, in “Fathers” Munro explicitly uses an autobiographical incident – her father’s 1943 near-electrocution in a neighbour’s barn – as the basis of a fiction. Yet “Fathers” is a fiction, for the father in the story is nothing like Robert Laidlaw and, besides, he is electrocuted.
    Neither “Lying Under the Apple Tree” nor “Fathers” was included in
Runaway
. They were passed over because, as Munro would explain in the foreword to the volume which did include them,
The View from Castle Rock
, she judged them “closer to my own life than the other stories” she had to consider for
Runaway
. Having long contemplated what she had once called “a family book,” the one that she was now to take up as both a project of new composition and long-considered revisions, Munro ultimately saw these stories as better placed there –
Castle Rock
, as well, was one she was then calling “my last book.” 6
    Before
Runaway
, published in the fall of 2004, there was in fact another book:
No Love Lost
. It is a collection of Munro’s stories on a theme selected by Jane Urquhart and published by the New Canadian Library in Canada only, aimed at school adoption as well as bookstore sales. It was published in 2003 and, through it, Gibson and Staines were able finally to get Munro into the firm’s paperback line. Gibson made his formal proposal in August 2000 – the proposed title was “Falling in Love: Stories on a Theme” – and Munro accepted it immediately. Urquhart was to select the stories; the original plan was seven stories, a book of about 250 pages priced at $9.95. This size and price addressed Barber’s concern that the existence of a smaller, cheaper selection of Munro’s stories should not compete directly with Penguin’s large paperback
Selected Stories
.
    Once terms were settled and Urquhart set to work, she found that she was unable to get the collection down even close to the intended size. Urquhart and Staines worked together on the selections but, after considerable effort, Urquhart concluded with a selection of ten stories, and some long ones at that, so the finished book is over four hundredpages. Given this, Gibson had to go back to Barber for her approval, and Barber in turn talked to Munro about it. Munro wanted to include all the stories selected, saying, according to Barber, “that if she was going to do this volume, she wanted the subject covered correctly.” Barber, who probably still had misgivings about the book’s effect on Canadian sales of the
Selected Stories
, conceded.
No Love Lost
was published in spring 2003 with a stunning painting by Mary Pratt,
Barby in the Dress She Made Herself
, on the cover. The initial run was 10,000 copies and, at 430 pages, the book retailed for $12.95.
    Urquhart’s selection of stories is both unusual and affecting. It is unusual because it is does not follow chronology. She begins with “Bardon Bus” (1982), follows it with “Carried Away” (1991), and then “Mischief” (1978); this mixed pattern is followed throughout. The selection is affecting because, as Urquhart writes of “the state commonly referred to as ‘falling in love’ ” in her afterword, “Munro is more interested in the singularity of the experience, in the days and months or years that precede or follow acts of communion, or in long, inward-looking periods of reflection that are born of a love that is either unrequited, difficult, or impossible.” 7 By making and arranging her selections to display the various ways Munro has made these times the core of her stories, Urquhart contributes through
No Love Lost
to the now unquestionable realization that Alice Munro’s art creates what might be called the feelings of being, just being a human being.
No Love Lost
in its focus anticipates a