Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Arbasino and Ismail Kadare – and was selected as the winner after a round of public voting, a potentially embarrassing process that the three contenders solved by turning the voting into a great joke. In October of 2008 she went to New York to be interviewed on stage by her
New Yorker
editor Deborah Treisman as part of the magazine’s annual festival. The highlight of 2009 was a trip to Dublin to receive the Man Booker International Prize and, that fall, she was slated to attend “A Tribute to Alice Munro” at the opening of the Vancouver International Writers Festival, although she did not make the trip for health reasons.
    She did participate in “Too Much Happiness!” – an event billed as “Diana Athill in Conversation with Alice Munro,” the opening gala of Toronto’s International Festival of Authors and a PEN Canada benefit. Athill is a well-known British editor and writer whom Munro had never met. The two women hit it off and have corresponded since – that night they had a wide-ranging conversation, chatting, as one news report put it, “about everything from sex, to Canadian literature, to how times have changed since they began their writing careers.” During that conversation, too, Munro acknowledged that she had had cancer – and, as with her earlier public musing that
Castle Rock
might be her last book, the revelation made headlines. Above all, throughout these years Munro wrote.
Too Much Happiness
was published in the fall of 2009, the
New Yorker
published “Corrie” in October 2010 and “Axis” in January 2011.
Harper’s
has two others forthcoming. Alice Munro writes on. 13
    One of the American reviews of
Castle Rock
, by Sigrid Nunez, comments that with this book Munro “has given us something much closer to autobiography,” and that “though Munro is temperamentally unsentimental the mood is often elegiac.” The place of autobiographyin Munro’s work, especially after
Castle Rock
, is inarguable, and Nunez’s point about the elegiac is backed by the images of Munro seeking after facts in cemeteries, and also by such stories as “What Do You Want to Know For?”, with the looming presence of mortality. Not at all unusual in an introspective writer approaching her ninth decade, certainly, but since her family book there has been a deepening of such elegiac tendencies and, in significant ways, a sharpening of the insight that has long been present in Munro’s stories. But with
Too Much Happiness
this observation has become even more acute. Claire Tomalin, an earlier British reviewer of Munro, has recently said that Munro “is a greater writer than” Katherine Mansfield, the subject of one of Tomalin’s books, “with a wider range, and a strangeness and strength, sometimes harshness, that I admire.”
    An early title for Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” was “Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear.” That story closes
Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage
, and the rejected nursery rhyme title seems to catch exactly what is going on there, for Munro and for each and every one of us: the progression of a life from birth through vibrant life to inevitable decline and a surrendering of our being to the next generation. This inescapable reality is just what Munro sees “with strangeness and strength” and “sometimes harshness,” just as Tomalin said.
    “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is a notable story too because in 2007 the Canadian actress Sarah Polley transformed it, as director and writer, into
Away from Her
, a feature film starring Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, and Olympia Dukakis. This title is actually Munro’s line, lifted from the story for the film. David Denby, reviewing the film in the
New Yorker
, called it “a small-scale triumph that could herald a great career” for Polley as a director. It captures Munro’s insight since, as Denby also writes, in it “Grant finds a way for personal survival and love for someone lost to flourish together.” And as A.O. Scott wrote in another review, there is “in Ms. Munro’s mature work, a flinty wisdom about heterosexual love, a skepticism about romantic ideals that does not altogether deny their power or necessity. Ms. Polley, rather remarkably for someone still in her twenties, shows an intuitivegrasp of this wisdom and a welcome, unsentimental interest in the puzzles and pleasures of a long, imperfect marriage.” Scott also said, “I can’t remember the last time the movies