Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

In this comprehensive biography, Robert Thacker, who has been called the
academic authority on Alice Munro, exhibits awesome organizational and
near-obsessive detail-tracking skills.

Munro, Canada’s goddess of short fiction, has stated that all her
stories are “anchored in reality,” meaning that in some way they
have a connection to her personal experience. Thacker concentrated on
this, connecting the dots between Munro’s life and her stories,
turning his magnifying glass on the autobiographical touches in her
writings.

The organization of the biography is chronological, starting with
Munro’s ancestors and proceeding at a snail’s pace through her
childhood, education, marriage, motherhood, bookstore work, divorce,
relationship with Gerald Fremlin, and international travels. Interwoven
with the facts of her personal life is the progress of her career as a
writer, her contacts with Canada’s literary movers and shakers,
literary agents and publishers. Dominating the text, though, are all
those threads linking life events to specific events, characters, and
settings in her stories.

The work is lush with detail, both in the body of the text and in the
supplementary material, which includes lists of Munro’s publications,
television and film adaptations, and interviews, and lists of works
about her by other authors.

In his emphasis on analysis, sources, and minute detail, Thacker tends
to lose sight of Munro as a person. He sees the passion in her work and
shows us how she viewed her own work at various points in her life. Yet
she remains a cardboard cutout of a great writer. While he has given us
the ultimate reference on Munro and her work, his own slow, plodding
style keeps her from coming to life.