Alice Munro: A chronicler of the simple and the remarkable

When her Lives Of Girls And Women was first published, Alice Munro hadn’t yet gained the significant recognition she holds today. At that time, the book was neither reviewed as a narrative about her journey as a writer nor was its distinctive style much commented upon. Instead, it was seen as a story about a girl’s sexual awakening. The Cosmopolitan magazine noted that Munro had captured the essence of a young woman coming of age, much like J D Salinger did for young men. They even dubbed her a lighter version of Sylvia Plath.

Alice Munro grew up in a small town just outside Wingham in Huron County, southwestern Ontario. Her father, Robert Laidlaw, took up farming in 1925, specialising in mink and foxes for the fur trade. Two years later, he tied the knot with Annie, an Eastern Ontario school teacher. Together, they acquired a modest brick house nestled on approximately five acres of land along the Maitland River. Munro was born after half a decade in 1931. Both of her parents shared a passion for reading, albeit in different ways. Among her early literary encounters was Charles Dickens’ A Child’s History Of England, her first read, a book readily available at home. She later read Anne Of Green Gables, inspired by her mother’s admiration for the series, although it was Emily Of New Moon by Lucy Maud Montgomery that captured her heart the most. 

In 1951, Munro married her first husband James Munro while still in her second year of college to get marriage “out of her way”, so she could focus on writing. Fast forward to 1963, and the couple relocated to Victoria, where they decided to open a bookstore. Not too long after, Munro’s role evolved from selling books to becoming one of the bookstore’s bestselling authors.

Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting 'Nighthawks' was used to illustrate Alice’s literary prowess in a 1982 review of her fifth book, The Moons Of Jupiter. The American novelist Lisa Eisner likened Munro’s stories to Hopper’s paintings. Eisner observed that, much like Hopper’s seemingly straightforward realism, Munro’s writing holds a deceptive simplicity. Beneath the realistic surface, there’s an element that transcends pure realism. 

But what are ‘ordinary lives’? Alice Munro had taken offence when fellow Canadian author Rex Murphy asked her if people in America would respond differently to her stories. All lives according to Munro were extraordinary.

In Lives Of Girls And Women, a novel that takes up the trope of becoming a writer, Munro describes a pivotal realisation which she explains with the metaphor of “deep caves” beneath the kitchen linoleum — that people’s lives are both ordinary and extraordinary simultaneously. This duality — capturing the simple and the remarkable — is what Munro strived to portray in her fiction.

In the 1950s, she tried to publish in The New Yorker unsuccessfully but got her big break in 1977 and published 60 stories in the magazine. Her career took off with her first collection, Dance Of The Happy Shades (1968), which earned her the Governor General’s Award, one of Canada’s highest literary honours. This debut collection set the tone for her future works. Munro was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime body of work in 2009, and in 2013, she received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Committee praised her as a “master of the contemporary short story.”

Of her process, she once admitted in a Paris Review interview: “I’m the opposite of a writer with a quick gift, you know, someone who gets it piped in. I don’t grasp it very readily at all, the “it” being whatever I’m trying to do. I often get on the wrong track and have to haul myself back.”

Munro’s characters are living, breathing entities with quirks, flaws, and desires that leap off the page. From an enigmatic spinster who harbours a secret passion for gardening, to the wily old farmer who spins yarns, a weary old housewife, the precocious child whose curiosity leads her down unexpected paths, and the ageing professor grappling with the ghosts of his past.

Less than a year before she won the Nobel Prize, Munro gave up writing which she called a well-thought-out choice. Tired of having a secret life as a writer, she finally wanted to “behave like the rest of the world”. More than a decade after she was diagnosed with dementia, she died, aged 92, on May 13, 2024.