Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

post office, on Josephine Street in Wingham. It was a gala occasion and Munro was being celebrated by hundreds of people. As she said, “all was wonderful and happy.” Then there was a surprise, a surprise worthy of an Alice Munro story. “I was signing books and a woman, an old woman, came up to me and said, did you know your mother got out of the hospital?
    “She began to talk to me and then other people interrupted and she just stayed until she could get me, and she told me the whole story of how my mother got out in the snow barefoot, got out some back door.” She had made her way to this woman’s house. The woman, a nurse, had nursed her in the hospital, and Mrs. Laidlaw knew where she lived. “And she went and knocked on the door in her hospital gown and told her she had to get out of there and she had to go home.”
    As Munro wrote in “The Peace of Utrecht,” the first of her stories to deal with the facts and memory of her mother, the one that uses Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s flight, people emerge in life to make “sure the haunts we have contracted for are with us, not one gone without.” When this woman approached her, Munro already knew about her mother’s escape, as her story makes clear; Aunt Maud and her grandmother made sure to tell her, but she did not know the details, that her mother was barefoot in the snow. Bob Laidlaw had not told Alice, off in Vancouver, how bad things were with her mother – and he certainly did not tell her about the escape; “he didn’t see why we had to know anything so harrowing.” 49
“I Felt As If My Old Life Was Lying Around Me, Waiting to Be Picked Up Again”
    Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s death led directly to “The Peace of Utrecht,” which appeared in the spring 1960 issue of the
Tamarack Review
, little more than a year after her mother’s death. Munro has called this story her “first really painful autobiographical story … the first time I wrote a story that tore me up”; it was one “I didn’t even want to write.” To another interviewer, she has commented that “Peace” “was the story where I first tackled personal material. It was the first story I absolutely had to write” and, because of this, there was nothing in it of the exercise Munro remembers in the stories she had written to this point. 50 And more than this, “The Peace of Utrecht” represents Munro’s imaginative homecoming to Wingham after her years away in Vancouver, home to the personal material that would subsequently become her hallmark.
    Set squarely in the centre of “The Peace of Utrecht” is the history of Anne Chamney Laidlaw’s lingering imprisoning illness and death. There too are Maud Code Porterfield and Sadie Code Laidlaw, living together in Jubilee, though just as Helen and Maddy’s aunts. It is the summer after their mother’s death, their father is long dead, and Helen – who did not return home for the funeral – has driven across the country with her children for a long visit with her unmarried older sister, Maddy. Helen “had won a scholarship and gone off to university,” as Munro writes in one draft, “and at the end of two years, to her own bewilderment, she was married, and going to live in Vancouver.” She still lives there. She is the story’s first-person narrator.
    The core subject of the story and much of its detail are autobiographical. Having been home the summer after her mother’s death, Munro had learned about her mother’s “harrowing” escape from the hospital, and that is in the story. Much else is imagined: Maddy has elected for the past ten years, the years Helen has been away, to look after their mother, and many of Helen’s circumstances do not correspond to Munro’s. She draws on her own visit home, creating the homecoming she had experienced, but does so amid imagined familydetails – Helen drives herself across the continent, the home is more middle class, it is in the town, Maddy and Helen’s father is dead.
    People ask me what it is like to be back in Jubilee. But I don’t know, I’m still waiting for someone to tell me, to make me understand that I am back. The day I drove up from Toronto with my children in the back seat of the car I was very tired, on the last lap of a twenty-five-hundred-mile trip. I had to follow a complicated system of highways and sideroads, for there is no easy way to get to Jubilee from anywhere on earth. Then about two o’clock in the afternoon I saw ahead of me, so familiar