Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

have another idea working out. I wish now I had never written
Real Life
, because the
next
one might be good, and R. L. just seems in my way. But I won’t do much till fall, because I’m taking my kids on the train to Ontario this summer.” She ended by responding supportively to Metcalf’s comments on the novel he was writing.
    Munro is quite emphatic that she was the one who left the marriage and that Jim was much steadier than she was as they decided what to do. As this was happening, there were infidelities as each turned to others while they were nominally still together. Alice was first, and Jim reacted. Her attitude toward these new relationships is seen in a revelatory comment some years later when writing to Marian Engel; she offers a report on the circumstances of each of her daughters, contrasting theirapproaches to living, and says of Sheila, “Like me, she must figure getting burned is what it’s all about.” 6 Having decided as much for herself, Munro lived through a two-year period of turmoil when she was still in Victoria, initially in the house on Rockland. But, over time, through living elsewhere and through trips, she was able gradually to pull away.
    In the summers of 1971 and 1972, before she finally left Victoria for good in 1973, Munro was able to leave with her children for long periods. During the summer of 1971 she took her daughters by train back to Ontario for a visit to Wingham and other places there; she recalls this trip especially because she and Andrea shared a room on the train while the older two daughters, then seventeen and fourteen, rode coach, ignoring their mother and sister and hanging out with the other teenagers on the train. While she was in Wingham, Munro read the proof of
Lives
. She returned to Victoria for the school year and did the publicity associated with her book from there. In June of 1972 she went with Andrea to Toronto, staying in Earle and Iris Toppings’s house during July and August while they were in India. Besides visiting her father in Wingham, Munro wanted to be in Ontario because of a relationship with a man she had been seeing.
    By then she had told Metcalf that she and Jim were separating and asked his advice as to how she might earn her living as a writer. Metcalf, who was about to head off to the University of New Brunswick as a writer-in-residence for a year, set about seeing if he might secure the same position for Munro for the subsequent year. He also visited Munro in Toronto in early August and, she later wrote to Toppings, “he looked bad enough” owing to his own marital problems. Metcalf was an important connection for Munro as she was making her break. Another writer and fellow sufferer, he shared her situation. 7
    When she returned to Victoria after her summer in Toronto, Munro took an apartment on Oak Bay Avenue not too far from the Rockland house and, after spending the morning writing, went over to be there when Andrea came home from school. She still did the cooking and the cleaning. Audrey Thomas recreates these circumstances in her story “Initram,” first published in 1975. It is based in parton a visit she made to Munro when she was living between Rockland and her apartment. “When she came to see me that time, I nearly had a fit because I wasn’t living at home,” Munro told Ross, also noting that many details in the story were true to the visit, though others were not. In its background, the story recounts how the two women met and it offers a transparent version of details from Munro’s biography – of Jim’s family and her history as a writer. Once the narrator arrives to visit her friend and fellow writer, Lydia, the details of her living arrangements recreate Munro’s just then. Since the story is a fiction, other details have been imagined or brought in from elsewhere, most especially the character of Lydia, whose personality and mannerisms are quite different from Munro’s. Yet Thomas’s editor at Oberon was sufficiently concerned about the likeness that, before the story was included in
Ladies and Escorts
, she checked with Munro to make sure she had no objection. “Initram” warrants mention here because it offers a glimpse into Munro’s circumstances over the winter of 1972 – whatever else the story ultimately does, it had its beginnings in Thomas’s visit to Munro at the time. The added material, however, means that it cannot really be said that Thomas’s story is about the breakup of