Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

exactly the same for the Chamney side and also spent most of a glorious spring day giving me an extended tour of Scotch Corners. And as I gathered archival confirmations from Ottawa Valley newspapers, Ann MacPhail of Algonquin College helped in many ways, even transcribing almost illegible microfilm.
    Although a blanket acknowledgement, I want to thank all those who agreed to talk to me (or in some cases, e-mail me), those whose interviews I cite here. A bit perversely, too, I thank those who refused to talk to me – their refusals occasioned considerable thinking about just what is involved in the writing of the biography of a living subject, thinking which doubtless helped this book. Among those who helped me, cited and not, I would like to mention a few people in particular. Helen Hoy, who has written some of the most important articles on Munro, generously shared her research into the making of
Who Do You Think You Are?;
without it, I would not have known some of the details of that story. Walter Martin, author of the first real critical book on Munro, was encouraging and provided necessary information about Robert Laidlaw. Catherine Ross told me about the writing of her own Munro biography and arranged for me to see the late Thomas Tausky’s excellent 1984 interview with Munro (for that, too, I thank Nancy Tausky). Ben Sonnenberg told me a great deal about how Munro was seen in New York in the early 1980s. In particular, Earle Toppings has been gracious, interested, and very helpful beyond his own memories of working with Munro. To my considerable regret, I never managed to speak to the late Harry J. Boyle about Munro, but I appreciate his daughter Patricia’s efforts to make that happen. I believe he did know just how important that interview was to Munro’s career.
    Closer to my home, there are several others to acknowledge. At St. Lawrence, Joan Larsen, Head of Reference and Instructional Services at the Owen D. Young Library, helped this project in countless ways – she is a great friend and a “friendly librarian” indeed, as so many of ushere know and appreciate. I hope this book meets the advice she gave me years ago. Then there is Nancy Alessi, Canadian Studies Program Assistant – she has helped this project in more ways than I can recount, and has done so precisely and with interest. Here too Bonnie Enslow undertook the work of transcribing hours and hours of interviews with diligence and interest. Graphic designer Ken Alger led me through the details of scanned photographs with precision and knowledge, teaching me a good deal as he produced the images that appear here.
    Finally, there is Michael Peterman of Trent University, one of the trio to whom this book is dedicated. Since we met in the late 1970s, we have shared the details of the academic life and of Canadian writing continually – working on projects together, travelling to conferences, keeping up with what’s going on. Michael is in many ways the spiritual godfather to this project – he has known about it as long as anyone, has always been encouraging, and he read the whole thing straight through, hammering the prose and my assumptions at every turn. Thanks are not really enough.

    Reviewing Joan Acocella’s
Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism
in the
New York Review of Books
, A.S. Byatt remarked that “biographical critics undo the artist’s work, and may kill the life of the art.” Throughout
Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives
, I have kept Byatt’s comment in mind and, probably more urgently, I have thought too about the exception Munro took to the “Toronto critic” who saw the house in the ground in “Images” as “symbolizing death, of course, and burial.” “What you write is an offering,” she conceded in the same essay, “anybody can come and take what they like from it.” This offering has consciously avoided discussion of Munro criticism, a subject that was a particular interest of mine in the 1990s. Now it is better to get at the biographical facts and individual interpretations of Munro’s career and her writing’s progress – as revealed by archival holdings and published sources – than to belabour interpretation. That, doubtless, will continue unimpeded. I hope, though, in closing this biography, that I have not too much displayed what Janet Malcolm recently enumerated as a “crucialbiographer’s trait: the arrogant desire to impose a narrative on the stray bits and pieces of a life that