Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

weighing between a hundred and thirty-five and a hundred and forty pounds.” While this story’s central incident is imaginary and some of the details of the protagonist and her husband differ from the Munros, she draws here upon the circumstances of her early months in Vancouver, recreating the atmosphere, tone, and circumstances of their experience. The narrator is of the same age and size, and has many of the attributes of Munro herself (she is a writer, is mechanically inept, and is drawn to libraries). More than this, though, the story concludes with finality – the narrator rejects Mrs. Gorrie, the mother of the landlord who lived upstairs and who had at first befriended her (and was among those calling her “little bride”), but who ultimately turned on her. “I didn’t take a final look at the house, and I didn’t walk down that street, that block of Arbutus Street that faces the park and the sea, ever again.” Naming the actual street where she lived, Munro again harkens back to her arrival in Vancouver, revisiting the person she was then. As in “Home,” where she wonders about her feelings forthe family home in Wingham and writes, “It seems to me it was myself I loved here, some self I have finished with,” in “Cortes Island” she revisits herself as a young bride.
    “Running away to the West was an adventure,” Munro once told a journalist. “We were very young; we had no idea what to expect.” Settling in to her new role of wife and her new life was both exhilarating and daunting, as she and her husband both tried to conform to what was expected, both by the mores of the time and by one another. While Jim went off to work downtown every day, Alice read, and she wrote – in “Cortes Island,” she refers to “filling page after page with failure” – and looked after their apartment, doing the domestic chores, adapting to her new role as housewife. As in her Wingham and university years, Munro was drawn to the library. The month after she arrived in Vancouver, she got a part-time job at the Kitsilano branch of the Vancouver Public Library. She worked part-time until the fall of 1952, full-time until June 1953 and, after Sheila was born in October of that year, part-time again until her next pregnancy in 1955. Looking back on her reasons for marrying, the years that followed, and what she did during those years, Munro has said,
    I got married because that was what you did. Actually, that was what you did to have a sex life, because there was absolutely no reliable birth control. So it was your next step into adulthood. So I was quite happy to leave and get married and go on. But then I didn’t foresee at all that it would be such a long haul to get anything written that would be any good at all. Mostly, all through my twenties all I did was read. I read an awful lot. I read most of the writers of the twentieth century that you’re supposed to have read.
    In “Cortes Island,” Munro’s narrator mentions that “I read books I got from the Kitsilano Library a few blocks away.… I bolted them down one after the other without establishing any preferences, surrendering to each in turn just as I’d done to the books of my childhood. I was still in that stage of leaping appetite, of voracity close to anguish.” 21
    Meanwhile, Jim continued to go downtown daily. Eaton’s, the leading Canadian department store at the time, did not have a management training program – young men like Jim Munro were hired and assigned to a department to work and learn on the job. Although initially he indicated an interest in books, and Eaton’s certainly had a book department, the personnel manager told him flatly that there was no money in books and assigned him to men’s underwear. (Alice, for her part, says that Eaton’s “would never let you do anything you were really good at.”) After a stint in underwear, which left him itching to do something else, he wrote advertising copy for the bargain basement; this was an assignment he enjoyed, and a creative one, since he got to write all the advertising. Eaton’s advertised in the Vancouver papers almost every day, so Jim got to use, he has said, “every cliché in the book.” He then moved into drapery before becoming the assistant manager of household linens. After that, he moved on to the fabric department. Jim spent twelve years at Eaton’s and, though he thought it a good place to work, he also never thought he was a good fit with the