Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

book she says she knew would not be popular, but one she needed to do. The idea of it dated from the 1970s, from the time of her return to Ontario and to Huron County from British Columbia; she and Virginia Barber referred to it occasionally during the intervening years. Thanks to her perfectionist penchant for revision and reshaping, the versions of the previously published pieces found in the 2006 book emerge as parts of a coherent whole – the ancestry and life of Alice Munro, shaped and reshaped, as she has written her lives. To accomplish this, Munro revised (“Home” and “Working for a Living”), she reshaped and expanded (“Changing Places”), she wrote new material as needed elements to fill in gaps in her own life story (“The Ticket,” “Messenger”), and she brought in stories little changed from their first
New Yorker
appearances (“Hired Girl,” “Lying Under the Apple Tree,” and “Fathers”). Making
Castle Rock
, she once more passed over “Wood,” leaving it (as well as the more recent “Wenlock Edge” [2005]) for
Too Much Happiness
(2009).
    Given its long provenance, its ancestral and personal subjects, and its inclusion of finally reshaped versions of Munro’s most revealing autobiographical writings,
The View from Castle Rock
might well have been – and quite fittingly – Munro’s last book. She publicly said it would be in June 2006, causing a small flap. Yet other stories and
Too Much Happiness
have followed. (Incidentally, that book’s title story – called a novella by
Harper’s
on its first publication – yet again reveals Munro’s penchant for historical writing, although there she writes on a subject wholly apart from anything personal, since it is focused on the life of a nineteenth-century Russian mathematician.) And now, in the winter of 2010–11, Munro has had two new stories published in the
New Yorker
– “Corrie” in October and “Axis” in January – while two more, “Train” and “Pride,” are forthcoming from
Harper’s
. These stories reveal her writing out of the 1950s and ’60s, which, like her return to her long-published pieces, is wholly consistent with her method and vision. Thus in 2010, and to the utter delight of her legions of readers – theirnumbers still growing through the acclaim her work continues to draw – Alice Munro continues to write on as she nears the beginning of her ninth decade.
“Maybe
I Can Do Something Unexpected with It”: The Long Approach to
The View from Castle Rock
    By the time she published
Runaway
in 2004 to its excellent reviews and sales – British hardback sales were 7,200 with over 70,000 for the paperback, Canadian were 72,000 in hardback and 60,000 for the paperback, and Knopf sold over 100,000 hardbacks and Vintage twice that in paper – Munro’s daily life had long followed its regular pattern: most of her time was spent in Clinton; she travelled in winter to British Columbia; she saw family and friends. She wrote. Her literary celebrity was something held at arm’s length but was nonetheless a fact of her life – journalists, critics, and others from outside Huron County were met at Bailey’s restaurant in Goderich; she talked to people on the telephone and, occasionally, for one attracting reason or another, Munro went somewhere to make an appearance or give a reading. But today, in the fall of 2010, she recognizes that both she and Gerry Fremlin are older; daily activities take longer, she has said; health issues have been, and remain, a concern. Their cross-country drives – though not the more local ones – have ceased.
    During the two years between
Runaway
and
The View from Castle Rock
Munro continued to appear in the
New Yorker
, with “The View from Castle Rock” and “Wenlock Edge” published in 2005, and “Dimensions” in 2006. Thus material that would appear in her next two books was published while, at the same time, she was also republishing in the United States some of the revised autobiographical pieces that had first appeared in Canada. “Home: A Story” was in the summer 2006 issue of
Virginia Quarterly Review
as part of “Ordinary Outsiders: A Symposium on Alice Munro.” 4 (Besides Munro’s contribution, it included a biographical overview, and appreciations by other writers, Munro’s editors, and others.) “What Do You Want to Know For?” appeared that summer in the
American Scholar
and, just as
The View
from Castle Rock
was being prepared throughout