Alice Munro's biggest fan

From a piece by Diana Athill in the Telegraph today:

Not long ago, I was invited to open a literary festival in Toronto together with the Canadian writer Alice Munro, whose work I have loved and admired for years. Flying to Canada: what a nightmarish thought! My whole body seemed to recoil from it, because my legs have become so wobbly that walking more that about 50 yards is impossible, and even that much is frighteningly difficult when my deaf old head is being battered by the incomprehensible din of places such as airports, an experience so horrid that probably no undeaf person can imagine it.

No no, I couldn’t face it. But then I thought: “The chance to meet Alice Munro at last – how can I throw that away?”

Alice Munro will be 80 in July.

The Voodoo of Fiction

A recent Canadian article http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/11/05/an-eerie-short-story-gets-even-eerier/ sees parallels between Alice Munro's 2006 story 'Dimensions' (in her new book Too Much Happiness) and a murder, two years later, in British Columbia, where she lives part of the time. Men do kill their children sometimes, and their wives discover the bodies, and yes, those men hear voices and so on - but anyone can understand why Munro finds it difficult to read that story out loud. Sometimes it's hard to write certain things just in case you make them happen. There could be a story about that if I dare put the words down.

Alice Munro

I was mopping the floor when I heard Alice Munro had won the International Man Booker Prize. I carried on mopping, listening to Jane Smiley enthusing about her work. When I started my Phd research on Munro in the early 90s no one had heard of her - except for the writers. She was more widely known by the time I published Alice Munro (Writers & Their Work). But it seemed as though Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2002) would be her final book. In interviews she said she'd stopped writing, and and there was a valedictory feeling about the stories; and so I grimly entitled my last chapter 'Ageing, Decay, Abjection'. Two collections later, and with a third on its way this October, she is coming to Dublin to get her prize.

Articles on Munro stress small town life, relationships, the domestic. They sometimes make her sound comfortable and nice. She is not. This is from the title story in The Love of a Good Woman (1998):

In the dreams that came to her now she would be copulating or trying to copulate (sometimes she was prevented by intruders or shifts of circumstances) with utterly forbidden and unthinkable partners. With fat squirmy babies or patients in bandages or her own mother. She would be slick with lust, hollow and groaning with it, and she would set to work with roughness and an attitude of evil pragmatism.


Alice Munro's stories are full of dreams, misconceptions, deceit and distractions. Distraction is an art, I think, listening while mopping (inadequately - there's still plaster dust, only now it's more like runny foundation). What I learnt from her is that stories can go off at a tangent. They don't have to have a theme or to hang together, symbolically or otherwise. Now I'd better go and rinse the mop.