Housewife finds time to write stories

There has been so much written about Alice Munro since her death, that I thought there was nothing I could possibly add. So many people - readers, writers, literary critics - have talked about what her stories meant to them, and how her characters resonated with them. The outpouring of love was genuine and beautiful.

But then I was driving back from Calgary the other day listening to CBC when the lovely voice of Eleanor Wachtel came on. I was a huge fan of her (now-defunct) show, Writers & Company and found her interviews to be insightful, kind, and a fascinating opportunity to hear directly from a wide variety of authors.

On this show, she replayed a recording of an interview she had with Munro in 2004. You can listen to it here:
www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-77-writers-and-company/clip/16068310-alice-munro-writing-life-love-sex-secrets

They met at a restaurant near the author’s home shortly before she won the Scotiabank Giller Prize (for the second time). It was so wonderful to hear Munro’s voice as she spoke about her writing process, adultery, sex, her life growing up in a small rural town, and the opportunities women have today.

I confess it’s been years since I’ve read Munro's work. And I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t recall, most importantly, that at the heart of almost all her writing was her feminism. Her portrayal of the lives of girls and women and what drives them to take a different path than the one prescribed for them was perceptive and unfailingly honest. Reality of life as a wife and mother often falls short for the women in Munro’s stories. Escape becomes possibility as they grasp for a different future.

As we all are, Munro was a product of her time and her stories were mined from her own life. She was born in 1931 on the outskirts of a town called Wingham, a child of the Great Depression. Poverty constrained her family and her Scottish parents, particularly her mother, hid behind convention and decorum. The underbelly of a woman’s life, mainly sex, was never discussed, and if alluded to at all, it was clear it was solely for the husband’s pleasure. Women were meant to keep a home and raise children.

So, it’s no surprise to find the headline in a local newspaper after the publication of her first collection: “Housewife finds time to write stories”. I like to imagine more than a few young women reading that headline, vowing to overcome their own restrictions.

Initially underestimated, Munro’s subject matter deepened over time as she railed against the expectations of her era and gender. As Sandra Martin in the Globe & Mail says, “she struggled to succeed as a writer without being swamped by domesticity and motherhood”. This could not have been easy. Yet despite these limitations, Munro’s talent for turning ordinary life into art blossomed into international recognition as she went on to write a novel and 150 short stories.

She was an intuitive writer, who was less likely to be concerned with problems of form than with clarity and veracity. Some critics faulted her for a tendency toward disorganization or diffusion—too many shifts in time and place within a single story, for example.

On her strengths as a writer, however, critics generally agreed: She had an unfailing naturalness of style, an ability to write vividly about ordinary life and its boredom without boring her readers, an ability to write about the past without being sentimental, a profound grasp of human emotion and psychology.

Chief among her virtues was her great honesty: her refusal to oversimplify or falsify human beings, emotions, or experience. One of her characters states, “How to keep oneself from lying I see as the main problem everywhere.” Her awareness of this was evident, certainly in the distinctive voices of her narrator-protagonists, who are scrupulously concerned with truth. Finally, her themes—memory, love, transience, death—are significant.

To explore such themes within the limitations of the short-story form with subtlety and depth was Munro’s achievement. I can’t wait to re-discover all her wonderful work.

In the meantime, happy reading!
Joni