Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

began, Alice Munro was on her way to becoming “world famous in Canada” as the decade ended.
Real Life
, retitled
Lives of Girls and Women
and advertised as a novel by McGraw-Hill Ryerson, would serve to accelerate that change. 38
Lives of Girls and Women:
“I Just Want to Keep Writing Whatever I Can” – “And I’m Never Quite Sure Ahead of Time What This Will Be”
    Recalling the incidents that led to her story “The Office,” Munro has written, “And then it started to happen, the real small miracle, when something, someone, starts to live and grow in your mind and the story makes itself. I didn’t even recognize this as anything to be grateful for,” annoyed as she was at the landlord because he was “cutting into my efforts to bring forth something important and beautiful, some real writing.” What she was after in her office above that drugstore in 1961 was a novel, the novel she had been after even then for some years and would continue to pursue throughout the 1960s, trying repeatedly to produce what she here calls “real writing.” Munro then offers what might now seem a shocking revelation: “I didn’t want to write another story. For years and years I didn’t want to write more stories. I feel that way yet some of the time, but am resigned.” Even now, she says she occasionally has this same feeling.
    After years of these repeated attempts,
Lives of Girls and Women
came together during 1970. She recalls beginning it on a Sunday in January. Seeing that she was off ruminating in that other country of her imagination, Jim told her to go down to the closed store to write, that he would get supper for the family. She did, beginning with what she calls “a regular novel” with the “Princess Ida” section of the finished book. Munro kept at the material in this way until sometime in March when, during a lunch with a group of other women, she realized that the structure of a regular novel was “all wrong” for what she was doing, so she went home and started to break the material into sections. By late October Munro wrote to Coffin. After apologizing for being “such an all-time record rotten correspondent,” she reported that “I’m writing very hard. Should be more or less finished in December, if I don’t go nuts trying to juggle kids, work, etc.”
    The manuscript was finished by then, and satisfied that Coffin would remain at McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Munro sent
Real Life to
her on December 10. She described the book as “partway between a novel andseries of long stories, all [a] ‘growing up’ sort of thing which I’ve at last, praise the Lord, worked out of my system.” She adds that “the last, short, untitled section may not fit in perhaps could be dispensed with.” Coffin wrote back on the fourteenth, acknowledging receipt and saying that she “is so happy that you have sent the MS to us” and that she has got “permission from the Authorities to read the manuscript first & am looking forward to doing it at home.”
    In her letter of the tenth, Munro was referring to “Epilogue: The Photographer,” the then untitled portion of the text that would vex her – she alternated between keeping it and dropping it, continually rewriting it – well into 1971, even as the book went into production. Articulating these uncertainties to Coffin, on December 22 Munro sent her some revised pages for the “Baptizing” section and wrote: “The eighth section – those few pages at the end – isn’t right and I suppose had better be scrapped. I wanted each section to cover an area of growing-up – Religion, Sex, etc – but creativity – how it starts & what happens to it – was beyond me. I thought of working it into section seven [‘Baptizing’], but that would muddy the emphasis.” It would have, indeed. For reasons biographical as well as aesthetic, Munro’s struggle with the epilogue of
Lives of Girls and Women
is indicative, a key moment in her life, as well as in her career. 39
    As is well known,
Lives of Girls and Women
contains a signed author’s disclaimer: “This novel is autobiographical in form but not in fact. My family, neighbours and friends did not serve as models. – A.M.” Placed on the copyright page, this disclaimer appears just before the dedication: “For Jim.” While just a passing comment, Munro has said that she worked on
Lives
that year (“I am writing very hard”) in the knowledge that her marriage was coming to an end, so the book