Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

contrast, how eager (and often successful) young writers are today to get that first book published. But during the early 1960s she was too busy. Her daughters were growing. Sheila, approaching the age of ten, was engaged in the myriad activities that she describes in
Lives of Mothers and Daughters
(though Jim was also involved in getting her to things). Her sister Jenny, three years younger, participating in those activities as the younger sister, was differentiated in age and also, as Munro makes clear when she thinks about her two daughters in “Miles City, Montana,” in personality. Sheila Munro has registered her surprise at her mother’s precise ability to capture her younger personality in that story. Jenny, the principal in that story’s central episode – she did fall into the water in Miles City in 1961, a four-year-old who could not swim – remembers it happening. In a tribute to Marian Engel Munro published in 1984, she acknowledges Engel’s use of her own experiences as a young mother, seeing in her a compatriot, “another who is just managing to keep afloat in the woozy world of maternity, with its shocks and confusions and fearful love and secret brutality.”
    Munro’s writing, like Engel’s, took place amid the demands of the circumstances of motherhood. And with the struggle to produce a novel during the late 1950s and early 1960s, that writing seldom seemed to go well. A fragment in Munro’s papers captures this time, and Munro’s situation, well:
    In the spring of 1963, in Vancouver, my husband was working in a department store, and I was staying at home looking after our two daughters – who, at six and nine, did not need so much looking-after as they used to – and trying to write. The typewriter was in our bedroom, by the window. I would sit down and type a few words on the yellow paper. A few sentences, maybe. Then I tried white paper. I never got halfway down the page. I went and made a cup of instant coffee and sat in the living-room, trying to see again the form of my lovely novel,that big bright fish that slipped round and round in the depths of my mind, and would not be hauled into the daylight. I went into the bedroom and tried again. I thought about being over thirty. Nothing done.
    I began to have trouble breathing. I was aware of each breath and couldn’t be sure of the next. The air that was air to other people was to me a hostile jelly. But the children came in from the yard and my husband came home from work and I made dinner. I didn’t tell anybody.
    So it was with Munro in the early 1960s, as stories like “Miles City, Montana” make clear. The Munros’ 1961 family trip across the continent back home to Ontario in their Morris Oxford – a car they did own – is deftly preserved in one of Munro’s most autobiographical stories. While the drowning of Steve Gauley remembered from the narrator’s childhood is imagined, and is an effective framing device, Jenny’s near accident is not. What Munro describes is what happened; it was “one of the worst moments of my life,” she recalls, saying she can still see “that pink frilly bottom” in the water. It lay in the Munros’ memories until sometime during the 1970s when she chose to write about it; she tried to use it first in an earlier story connected with
Who Do You Think You Are?
“Miles City, Montana” represents an example of Munro’s usual method, the use of an experience some years after it happened, recalled in tranquillity after some years of “teasing the mind.” 13
    That was her normal method, but “The Office” was one story that grew directly from Munro’s circumstances in 1960 or 1961 and so offers a precise sense of her situation then. The story focuses on the altercation Munro had with a difficult landlord, fairly immediately and without much rumination. In a 1978 essay, “On Writing ‘The Office,’ ” Munro calls it “the most straightforward autobiographical story I have ever written.” It details her relations with the landlord of an office she rented above a drugstore on the north side of the 2500 block of Marine Drive in Dundarave, a shopping area two blocks south of Lawson in West Vancouver, where the Munros lived. “The solution to my life occurred to me one evening while I was ironing a shirt,” the storybegins. The narrator then tells her husband, who is watching television, “I think I ought to have an office.” Munro has said that “The Office” was the only