Alice through a clearer glass

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Alice Munro’s genius has been to write about her own life and the places and people most familiar to her around Lake Huron in western Ontario, digging further and further into the same material over six decades. Her readers know exactly where they are, “in a town like ours where nothing is forgotten”. As the narrator of the short story Pride in this new collection says: “Any town is a place like that.” The scholarship girl clawing her way out of rural poverty; men and women whose ambitions and desires are constantly thwarting each other; small farms, large crimes, timeless dilemmas.

The process of fictionalising her own life has become what Munro’s life is all about, a habit of mind that must be rather hard to live with, as witness her daughter Sheila’s clunky memoir (published in 2008) that sounded simultaneously proud and aggrieved by her extraordinary parent.

Munro is now in her eighties, and though still better than every other short-story writer in English, she lives under the shadow of her own massive achievement. The 10 stories that make up the first section of Dear Life wouldn’t get into her all-time greatest selection, for all their substance (the returning soldier in Train who gets off one stop early and changes the course of his life, the old woman’s failing grip on reality in In Sight of the Lake, the bullied wife in Haven who “smiled just as soon as she knew it was okay to smile”). But this book is about something else.

In Too Much Happiness Munro made a rather surprising departure into fictionalised biography; in Dear Life she makes an even bolder move, speaking in her own voice in a group of four stories, cordoned off at the end of the book under the ominous subheading Finale. They are “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last — and the closest — things I have to say about my own life”. Any Munro fan will rush to these, curious to see what she is prepared to tell us.

One is about viewing the corpse of her former babysitter, another about her mother’s total misinterpretation of an incident in the author’s babyhood. Voices is about mixing with the wrong neighbours, and Night is an extraordinary description of childhood insomnia in which Munro discovered that the blackest thoughts (including the idea that she could strangle her little sister) “could be lying right beside me there in the night”. “Motives were not necessary. It was only necessary to give in.”

There’s a feeling of rigorous, methodical self-exposure in these four pieces, as if they were transcripts of therapy sessions in which the author was both subject and analyst. Incidents that will be seared into the minds of readers from their fictional treatments —her father’s beatings, for example, her mother’s illness, the layout of the fur farm they lived on — fall back into a different context. Life really is stranger than fiction, Munro tells us, and has no control over its own effects. Thus, recalling a scandalous woman at a dance in low-cut orange taffeta, Munro says: “I think that if I were writing fiction instead of remembering something that happened, I would never have given her that dress. A kind of advertisement she didn’t need.” And a country neighbour called Roly Grain is no sooner mentioned than dropped: “He does not have any further part in what I am writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life”.

“Not quite stories” she calls these boldly experimental slices of autobiography. Even at a time when a loosening of creative vitality or ambition would be forgivable and expected, Alice Munro retains her unique, amazing power.

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