Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

author into what might be seen as the story’s fictional surfaces. The correct phrase is “might be seen” here because this is a central issue in the art of Alice Munro: her stories mostly begin in “real life,” as she said in her interview with Harry Boyle and has freely admitted throughout: “There is always a starting point in reality.” In “Material,” for instance, Munro wrote, “When I was pregnant with Clea we lived in a house on Argyle Street.” When Alice Munro was pregnant with Sheila, she and Jim lived in a house on Argyle Street in Vancouver; a more recent story, “Cortes Island,” has the young narrator, a new bride, living on Arbutus Street, where they lived before that. 6 As Munro also told Boyle, the episode in “The Ottawa Valley” with the safety pin did happen. Thedetails offered in “Home,” from the people and circumstances depicted, to the route taken to the Wingham hospital – the streets named would be either taken or passed when driving from the Laidlaw farm to the Wingham hospital – are factually exact. So too are the circumstances of that story’s narrator: she feels sensitive over the life she was then leading in London – one her stepsister must see as “incomprehensible” with “no work: nothing she could even call work, no animals to look after or vegetables to harrow and dig.”
    More crucially, there is the fact of Wingham itself. The town is the place that Munro, writing in October 1973 about a visit made earlier that month (though during the previous summer she also had visited Wingham regularly), asserts that she “has written about … and used … up,” the “secret, plentiful messages” Wingham’s outward signs had held for her had now “drained away.” In one sense this was true: the Wingham of mind and memory, the place recalled from the west coast since 1952, separated by time and distance, in Munro’s previous work – in stories like “Walker Brothers Cowboy” or “Images” or “Boys and Girls” from
Dance of the Happy Shades
, in the whole of
Lives of Girls and Women
, and even in some of the stories in
Something
, like “Winter Wind” – that remembered Wingham may well have been “used up.” Yet in “Home,” back there in Wingham in October 1973, Munro was looking at the place anew, so it was not at all used up, only different.
    In “Home” the narrator explains her previous relation to Wingham, and to her remembered home there: “Now that I am living a hundred miles away I come home every two months or so. Before that, for a long time, throughout my marriage, I lived thousands of miles away and would go without seeing this house for years at a time. I thought of it then as a place I might never see again. I was greatly moved by the memory of it. I would walk through its rooms in my mind.” Looking at it now, her mother long dead, “reminders of my mother in this house are not easy to find. Though she dominated it for so long, filled it with astonishing, embarrassing hopes, and her dark and helpless, justified complaint.” 7
    The presence of “Home” in Munro’s work is crucial as this book begins: it confirms its author’s imaginative grappling with her “homeplace.” That phrase is Wright Morris’s; he used it as the title for a book Munro very much admires. Returning to Ontario, she found her home place lying before her in 1972–73 as a mature woman in her early forties, having left it a very young woman of twenty. Munro returned home as an author of some accomplishment and renown (especially since
Lives of Girls and Women
was just then showing every sign of marked success), having left it as a gifted student writer. Most of all, “Home” shows Alice Munro wondering over, and trying to find new ways into, her home place as material: though worried that she may have “used up” Wingham, that all the town’s “secret, plentiful messages” had been “drained away” by her long-distance rememberings, she rediscovered anew her home place, a place where “everything was touchable and mysterious.”

    This was the Alice Munro who walked into the studio for her interview with Harry Boyle for
Sunday Supplement
to discuss
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
. It is more casual conversation than interview, really. And at over forty minutes in length, Boyle had time to meander. A journalist, broadcaster, columnist, and novelist, Harry Boyle was a wholly appropriate choice for the assignment the CBC