Opinion Remembering Alice Munro: A peek into the complexities of domestic relationships

In 1961, when she was about 30 years old and had found some success with her short stories, Vancouver Sun ran a piece on Canadian writer Alice Munro, whose headline read: “Housewife finds time to write short stories.” On any other writer, the condescension would have stung. But it sat easy with Munro. Through her long, decorated career, the self-effacing Nobel laureate maintained that it was familial life — her role as a daughter, mother, and, as she described herself once, for a little while, “a B-minus housewife” — that had made writing possible for her. Across collections of short stories such as Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) to Too Much Happiness (2009) to Dear Life (2012) and others, Munro mapped the changing architecture of domestic relationships and the emotional complexity born of its quotidian rhythms. The writer, 92, died on Tuesday.

In the jostle for literary capital, the short story as a genre tends to get short shrift. But in Munro’s hands, it became a many-layered thing of beauty, her mastery over conciseness making room for a complex interiority with Chekovian dexterity. Awarding her the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her body of work, the committee commended the near perfection of her craft, its “depth, wisdom and precision” that often surpassed a novelist’s labours of a lifetime. What was it that Munro wrote of? She wrote of mothers and daughters, spinsters and divorcees, adulterers, wives and working women; of loneliness and grief, boredom and humiliation and the sudden upheavals that chance sweeps in.

Advertisement

At the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, a personal item of each laureate is on display, offering a glimpse into their personalities. The dictaphone and cassettes on which she recorded stories for Voices from Chernobyl accompany 2015 winner Svetlana Alexievich’s citation; a clunky watch and designer glasses represent Gabriel Garcia Marquez. For Munro, the 2013 winner, there is a worn copy of The Portable Chekhov, the writer she has most been compared to. Both master wordsmiths, working on montages of the many versions of one life.