Saying goodbye to the extraordinary Alice Munro

I have been writing in this column about birth anniversaries of writers, but sometimes you have to stop and talk about death and loss. The Nobel Prize winning Canadian writer Alice Munro passed away on May 13. She was 92 years old. Alice Munro was a ‘Sultana of the Short Story’ (we have had a few in our literatures as well), one who drew on her personal experiences and surroundings, and interviewers would often identity and ask her about the settings of her stories. Her stories, though often called “domestic stories”, cover a whole range of emotions and relationships. It is almost as if she had decided when she began writing that she would find all her material around her, in her family, in her environment. She made time to write amidst her household chores as she has said in many interviews.

Munro once said, “When the kids were little, my time was as soon as they left for school. So I worked very hard in those years. My husband and I owned a bookstore, and even when I was working there, I stayed at home until noon. I was supposed to be doing housework, and I would also do my writing then. Later on, when I wasn’t working everyday in the store, I would write until everybody came home for lunch and then after they went back, probably till about two-thirty, and then I would have a quick cup of coffee and start doing the housework, trying to get it all done before late afternoon.” (The Paris Review, 1994). Thus, the patronising headline in the Vancouver Sun (in 1961) that began an article about her after she had published her early stories — ‘Housewife finds time to write short stories’ — doesn’t seem too off the mark!

She wrote during her pregnancies, she wrote whenever she could, but she wrote. Her first collection was published when she was in her mid-thirties, and contained stories written over 15 years. Her stories talk to us because they talk to her. After all, all the stories come from her life. One can say that Alice Munro wrote only one book, the book of her life. She writes about her Scottish ancestors, her parents, her relationship with them and their home, her own life. Set mostly in Ontario, Canada, in Huron county, Munro’s work is like a historical and anthropological study of the place and the people, a dissection of her own life, and that of her contemporaries.

Supported by her husband, who gifted her a typewriter to encourage her writing, Alice Munro began her married life like other middle-class girls of the time, staying home while her then husband went out to work. As she writes in ‘The Moons of Jupiter’ (1978), the small-town life of the time was one of “wives yawning, napping, visiting, drinking coffee, and folding diapers; husbands coming home at night from the city across the water”. In a damning line, she writes: “We had become a cartoon couple, more middle-aged in our twenties than we would be in middle age.”

Books and writing became her life. The couple went on to open a bookshop. Her first book was published in fortuitous circumstances — she had been asked to submit some stories for an anthology that never got published, but she impressed the editor, who began to read all her published stories. The publishing house then asked her to write three more to make a book, and she made a mark immediately. ‘Dance of the Happy Shades’ (1968) won the Governor-General’s Award, resulting in another collectible headline — ‘Literary fame catches city mother unprepared’.

Alice Munro’s stories are about ordinary people but her range is vast, mainly because even ordinary people live complicated lives, lives which she brings to us with such skill that you get to know each one of her characters intimately. Alice Munro gives us lives of desires and deceit. She does not hesitate to write about sexual peccadilloes. She was a complete short story writer. Always modest and insecure about her writing ability, Alice Munro felt surprised by attention even after she won the Nobel Prize in 2013.