Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

2006, Knopf was also assembling
Carried Away: A Selection of Stories
(2006), with a detailed and precise introduction by Margaret Atwood, as a volume in its Everyman’s Library series. The two books were published concurrently in September. 5
    Apart from all the ongoing publication, there was a major change in Munro’s career: Virginia Barber had retired from the William Morris Agency at the end of 2003 – Munro went to New York for the party in November – and Barber’s longtime associate Jennifer Rudolph Walsh became her agent. While Barber is no longer responsible for placing Munro’s work, she is still an early reader of new stories, as is Ann Close at Knopf. Her agent may have changed, but Munro continued to receive awards, both abroad and at home. She was named a “Woman of Achievement” by the Edith Wharton Society and in May 2003 travelled to New York to receive the award – Barber was a bit mystified at this acceptance, since Munro had passed on others her agent thought to be equally or more significant. In May 2005, Munro received the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award, given to a senior British Columbia writer and sponsored by the Terasen Gas Company,
B.C. BookWorld
, and the Vancouver Public Library. Accepting this award, Munro recalled her time working as a clerk in Vancouver’s Hastings and Main library – there was a rule, she said, that only librarians could direct patrons to books, that she was not allowed to and, in fact, had been reprimanded for doing so. She would still like to be allowed to do this, she said: “That would be a treat.” She also recalled writing in the library when she lived there, avoiding the landlady who wanted to talk to her, the person she later used in her story “Cortes Island.”
    There were other sorts of notice confirming Munro’s reputation too: in October 2005
Harper’s
ran a long essay by Ben Marcus taking extended issue with Jonathan Franzen’s writings on contemporary fiction and the market – Marcus cites Franzen’s handling of Munro and
Runaway
in his 2004 review in
New York Times Book Review
as a central instance of Franzen’s self-indulgent errors. And in June 2006, tracing the whole of Munro’s Vancouver experiences and using her renderings of the city as a kind of literary guided tour, travel writer David Laskinpublished a piece on Alice Munro’s Vancouver in the
New York Times. 6
    When she received the lifetime achievement award in Vancouver in May 2005, Munro remarked of her next book that “It’s not a book of complete fiction like I’ve always written before,” referring to its historical cast. After making this comment, she added that she intended to retire after it was completed. Two months later Munro published an essay as her contribution to a volume aimed at raising money for PEN Canada,
Writing Life
. It is called “Writing. Or, Giving Up Writing,” and it does suggest that she may stop writing, although its meaning is equivocal. When the book containing this essay was about to be launched at a Toronto gala on June 20, 2006, where Munro was scheduled to read, a syndicated story appeared throughout Canada with headlines like “Literary Icon Alice Munro Expected to Retire Tonight.” At the event, Munro closed her presentation by telling the audience that “I wrote this essay about six months ago. At the time, I thought it to be true.” Her editor, Douglas Gibson, insisted that this forthcoming book would not be Munro’s last. 7
    Well he might insist, since Gibson had been working with Munro and her intuitive methods since the mid-1970s – he had seen her uncertainties before and had even, famously, and at a critical point in Munro’s career in 1978, pulled
Who Do You Think You Are?
from the press for restructuring according to her wishes. Two years after that episode, as she was envisioning the contents of what would be
The Moons of Jupiter
, Munro wrote to Gibson from Australia summarizing her available stories, concluding: “so these ten stories quite definitely have enough length for a book.” Complicating her situation just then, Munro continues, is another finished piece she has at hand, as she explains:
    There is also a long Memoir I wrote about my father, which I think is pretty good, but I think it should be kept out for a kind of family book I want to do someday – maybe about the Laidlaws in Huron County and in Ettrick & James Hogg whose mother was Laidlaw. There’s a whole lot of interesting stuff about