Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

twenty years contemplated what she called the “family book,” with
The View from Castle Rock
Munro showed herselfwell aware that she was producing a book that was both unlike any other she had previously published and – given age, the fullness of time, and very close proximity of its subject and characters (her own ancestors, her immediate family, herself) – it was a book that seemed to complete the life-circle Munro had begun through her stories since she began publishing them in the early 1950s.
“Calamity Had Arrived with the End of Childhood”: Writing
Her
Life:
The View from Castle Rock
    “Working for a Living,” which Munro mentions in her 1980 letter to Gibson, is a piece that began as a story. Through repeated revision (at the hands of the
New Yorker
editors) it became a memoir – only to be rejected by them in that form. It was finally published in 1981 as the first piece of the inaugural issue of
Grand Street
, alongside contributions by Northrop Frye, Ted Hughes, W.S. Merwin, and Glenway Wescott, among others. Reshaped and expanded, it is in
Castle Rock
as the conclusion to the first section, “No Advantages.” Given its history, its subject, and Munro’s placement of it – conversations with her editors, both Gibson and Close, confirm that the book’s structure was largely Munro’s own – “Working for a Living” plays a central role in
The View from Castle Rock
. Other “family” pieces – all of which Munro insists in her foreword to that book need to be called
“stories”
– appear there in revised form. Begun, as she announces in the first sentence of a notebook draft, on “the twenty-fourth of October, 1979,” the memoir version may be readily seen as growing from both Munro’s return to Ontario and her reaction to the death of her father in August 1976.
    The revised version in
Castle Rock
bears the marks of sustained rewriting (Munro has acknowledged working on it at least since 2001), although the most substantial revision is the addition of the last two pages or so of meditation on her father’s late writing career. “Working” is a distilled and poignant rendering of her parents as individuals and, more than that, it defines Munro’s own relation to each of them at two critical moments in her childhood: First, when she travelled in 1943 as a nine- or ten-year-old with her father to the Muskoka hotel whereAnne Chamney Laidlaw, blooming in her new role, had been successfully selling fox furs directly to American tourists. And second, some years later when the family fox farm had failed, when her mother’s health had taken an irrefutable turn for the worse, and when Munro was sufficiently inured to the family’s situation that she looked to protect herself imaginatively while still living at home and was working toward a scholarship to university as a way out. Thus “Working” balances her mother’s real self – before she fell ill with Parkinson’s – with her struggles and eventual death. So too her father is shown as an unusually independent adolescent with his own trap line, then as a fox farmer who shared his fortunes with his wife and young family, and finally as a foundry night watchman and caretaker who worked to support that same family and look after his sick wife. Throughout, Munro contrasts her family’s circumstances with those of her grandparents – Sadie Code Laidlaw and her husband William. She meditates on their relationship, on their marriage and their rearing of her father, and on her grandmother’s presence in Wingham as Anne Chamney Laidlaw struggled with Parkinson’s and died.
    Munro has repeatedly seen her mother’s circumstances, once she had fallen ill and was in decline, as her default material, her central subject – pivotal stories like “The Peace of Utrecht,” “The Ottawa Valley,” and “Soon” suggest as much. In another notebook draft version of “Working” Munro confirms this when she writes:
    I was just starting high school when this happened. At the same time that it became clear that we were poor, and could not hope as we had once, for a dazzling change of fortune[,] it became clear that my mother was sick for good, not plagued by passing ailments. Calamity had arrived with the end of childhood[.] I pretended not to notice, living in fantasy in books, in private expectation of some vaunting success.
    The presence of long-published but never collected fugitive pieces like “Working” and the even older