Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

for some time. “She was just a walking library as far as I was concerned.”
    Munro describes these times as not “like literary conversation. It would be just like high-powered gossip. All we knew about these people,” the authors and the characters they created, “and their books and their writing and everything. It was the most exciting talk I ever had; of course, it was the only time in our lives that we got to do this. We both read but we didn’t know anybody who read like this.” Beyond their shared reading, the women were personally compatible – they shared an irreverent sense of humour that allowed them to delight, when they were together, in making fun of the pretensions of their neighbours and acquaintances, giving them nicknames, making up funny stories about their lives. One such episode involved an affected and very British couple who lived in the neighbourhood. It had them naming the woman “Difficult Passage” because of a comment her husband made about his wife’s difficulties in childbirth; Cue and Munro imagined the couple’s sex life, told each other their versions of it, laughing so much that “we sat down on street benches and just broke up,” Cue remembers. Although the two did sometimes see each other as couples – Cue recalls attending the Munros’ parties with her husband –the relationship was mainly between the two women. Recalling this time, Cue says that she “thinks Alice probably got a lot from women friends”; besides Cue, there were other friends, Mari Stainsby among them.
    Although the two spoke most frequently about their daily lives, local matters, and reading, Cue was well aware Munro was writing – the bedroom at the back of the house Munro worked in was next to their shared lane. “She’d be typing away every day, in the afternoons, when Sheila was at school and Jenny was having a nap.” Munro has frequently said that, during the time Sheila and Jenny were growing up, she was “very big on naps.” Generally, she did not talk much about what she was writing, but in two instances Cue was her source for stories. Apart from the grafting on of a play from her own high school experience, and having the boyfriend become an undertaker, Munro took the whole of “An Ounce of Cure” from Cue’s experience. When Munro sold the story to the
Montrealer
, she took Cue to dinner – there two sailors tried to pick them up. They were delighted by the impulse, but rebuffed the men. And while the circumstantial details are different, the hapless brother in “Forgiveness in Families” owes much to Cue’s own brother. 32
    Munro’s “double life” during the 1950s and early 1960s in West Vancouver involved, on the one hand, the day-to-day details of suburban living with a husband and a young family, and a disciplined writing schedule on the other. As she would write in “Miles City, Montana,” her narrator’s “real work” was “a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.” The children needed care, the house needed cleaning, there were meals to prepare. There were also regular local excursions – Jim Munro remembers trips with the children to the beach (one is detailed in “Shoebox Babies”) and around Vancouver, as well as trips back home to Ontario.
    There was adult society too. Daphne Cue recalls that the Munros would periodically have parties, often around holidays, as would other couples. This was a time of great drinking at parties – “We didn’t fool around,” Munro recalls. They did not keep liquor in the house normally, but when they had a party, she says, “everybody got plastered.… I can remember hanging out diapers with such a hangover, such a headache,every motion painful. We thought that’s just what you did.” There was then also, both at these parties and other social occasions, a fair amount of extramarital flirtation. Munro attributes this to the fact that most people were in their twenties or early thirties and had married young; hence, things happened. But the more dramatic incidents, of flirtation acted upon, lay ahead. What happened at a party during the 1950s didn’t count. Munro offers a recreation of one of these West Vancouver parties, and one of these extramarital situations in “Jakarta,” in
The Love of a Good Woman
. Cue recalls such parties then down on the beach at Oak Bay in West Vancouver, parties that included skinny-dipping, though she does not remember being at any with the Munros. Judging from