Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

materials surrounding her ancestors’ emigration, and on published materials regarding them that had appeared in
Blackwood’s Magazine
, but much of the “No Advantages” section of the book is imagined, created within the text. As has long been the case, Munro’s work with the
New Yorker
played a role in this larger process. Agreeing to publish only a portion of the submitted manuscript, Treisman and her colleagues shaped the story of the Laidlaws’ passage from Scotland to Canada into the twelve magazine pages they published in August 2005. When the book version was published, the effects of this process were evident, since the story published in the magazine (itself an expansion of the earlier “Changing Places”) is retained, with the rest of thelong submitted manuscript shaped into the full separate pieces that make up the book’s first section, “No Advantages.”
    Such details of composition, admittedly of keen interest only to Munro’s most devoted readers, nevertheless point to the unique process she undertook in the making and shaping of
The View from Castle Rock
: given its long gestation dating back to the 1970s,
Castle Rock
is a sustained instance of Munro’s writing
her
own life as the book’s central fact. With the “No Advantages” section of
Castle Rock
, Munro creates an ancestral context, in which she places herself in the second section, “Home.” In both sections, her treatment is anchored by pieces she had long meditated and had already written – “Working for a Living” and “Home” – freeing her to imagine, realign, and shape the rest of the book, using many of her fugitive pieces. As she explains in her foreword to
Castle Rock
– which Munro, urged by Gibson, agreed was necessary to explain the book to the reader (but which had some unintended consequences when connected to her several announcements that it would be her last book) – in these stories she “was doing something closer to what memoir does – exploring a life, my own life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could.” 11
    While it is possible here to point to several instances in which Munro may be seen imagining further, making new connections, bridging gaps in her ancestral story, an entirely new and first-published story, “The Ticket,” is the best illustration of what Munro’s made reshapings in
Castle Rock
reveal about her own life. Structurally, it is a needed story, for it bridges the gap between the revised “Hired Girl” (1994), which treats Munro’s high school summer spent working for a family at a cottage on Georgian Bay, and “Home,” which has Munro returned home to Ontario in 1973, visiting her father and his second wife in Wingham. “The Ticket” returns to Wingham just before Alice Laidlaw’s marriage to James Munro in 1951 and, in so doing, it recreates her circumstances as she awaits that marriage – her mother ill, her brother and sister much younger, the anticipation, the wedding itself. But most especially it meditates on her relations with her grandmother and aunt – the Code sisters, each a widow helping her prepare for herwedding – and muses over each older woman’s marriage along with, once again, that of her parents.
    At the centre of the story are Munro’s own desires, the feelings that led her to accept the proposal of a young man she here calls Michael: “He had bought me a diamond ring. He had found a job in Vancouver that was certain to lead to better things, and had bound himself to support me and our children, for the rest of his life. Nothing would make him happier. He said so, and I believed it was true.” This established, the story shifts to Munro’s feelings, to details of her grandmother and aunt’s lives, their loves, their marriages – and to their actions as they helped Munro prepare. Eventually, as she usually does, Munro returns to the core of her story, to the central image that carries the most pressing insight she offers: her own, retrospectively seen, lack of faith in what she was doing then, crucially, her own lack of commitment: “And I thought I loved him. Love and marriage. That was a lighted and agreeable room you went into, where you were safe. The lovers I had imagined, the bold-plumed predators, had not appeared, perhaps did not exist, and I could hardly think myself a match for them anyway. He deserved better than me, Michael did. He