Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

was done in a more determined and pressing way. When she talked to Thomas Tausky about
Lives
in 1984, Munro said she initially “saw the novel as a straight [story of a] girl growing up in Western Ontario. I saw it as being fairly comic, though how I could have got that notion I don’t know. But I did. I saw set pieces. It was a very high-spirited novel to me. I enjoyed writing it.” Seeing the story more effectively told through story-like “set pieces,” Munro abandoned the initial “regularnovel” form in March 1970; she had sought a continuous narrative, and evidence of this approach is in her papers. Once she had written the seven set pieces that make up most of
Lives
, though, she found herself struggling with the other implications of “Epilogue: The Photographer.” It is no set piece.
    In a December 1970 letter to Coffin, Munro continued: “I feel apologetic about turning out this sort of girl-growing-up thing, but I had to do it, it was there, I wanted to get it out. I’ve taken several vows now to get out of Jubilee forever. This has sort of wrapped it up for me. I hope you’re not too disappointed.” Alice Munro has never been able “to get out of Jubilee forever,” and the reasons for her struggle with the epilogue to
Real Life
have everything to do with her own real life. Until she confronted the implications of that epilogue, Munro told Struthers, the book “was not the story of the artist as a young girl. It was just the story of a young girl.… And yet, I found eventually that the book didn’t mean anything to me without it.” To Tausky, she describes the transformation of Del from just a young girl into an artist as “all this stuff coming out – which I didn’t really foresee or particularly want. I didn’t know what to do with it.” She spent about half as much time on the epilogue as she had, she told Struthers, “writing the whole book. And then I plucked it out and decided to publish the book without it … then I rewrote it and put it in.”
    The finished book’s disclaimer notwithstanding, what was happening in the composition of “Epilogue: The Photographer” was that Munro found herself being imaginatively pushed into a deeper, more essential, level of autobiography than the comic set pieces demanded. With its focus on Del as an artist and as a young woman, and on Del’s own concomitant struggle with the life she finds herself living and the other world she imagines and is drawn to, the epilogue’s few pages are infused with Alice Munro’s own life history. Del, like her author, had to choose between the “real” Marion Sherriff and the imagined Caroline Halloway. In both renderings there is the matter of Huron County’s factual detail, certainly, but more especially there is Munro’s commitment to transform that detail into the exceptional writing she has long sought and always produced. Little wonder she struggled and worriedover the epilogue, for in it she encapsulated not only her own life’s detail – seen and imagined – but also the very sensibility that had made her the writer she had become.
    The epilogue of
Lives of Girls and Women
returned Munro to her own beginnings by echoing the imitative Gothic novel she worked on, in her mind and on paper, when she was in high school. Called
Charlotte Muir
after the main character, a person who “lives in a lonely place off by herself,” the working out of its plot over an extended time was what brought Munro to the realization of “the twin choices” of her life, “marriage and motherhood or the black life of the artist,” as she told Tausky. In
Lives
, Munro put Del Jordan in much the same position as she had been herself. Writing her own novel with Gothic overtones, Del both rejects her uncle Craig’s fact-based writing method and also knows that her romanticized story of Caroline Halloway, a story seen in the epilogue as contrasting with the bland reality of Bobby Sherriff, is not quite right either. Del is getting “an idea that all art is impossible.” So was Munro herself at that time since, as Tausky has detailed in much the best article on the writing of
Lives
, this epilogue led directly to such stories as “Material,” “The Ottawa Valley,” and “Home” – that is, it led to stories that analyze a writer’s relation to her material and, seemingly, offer a rejection of any fictional artifice. 40
    Munro’s account of writing
Lives of Girls and Women
during 1970 makes a useful