Novelist Gish Jen talked to Alice Munro’s two closest editors, Ann Close and Chip McGrath, about the beloved Canadian writer’s rise from struggling mother to Nobel laureate. Plus, our 60-second guide to her life, and Malcolm Jones on her unerring art.
We all love the Alice Munro-as-struggling-writer stories. There is the story of how, when Munro made it onto the cover of Time Canada, she couldn’t afford to buy a copy of the magazine and also get milk for her children. (Of course, she bought the milk.) Or what about the story of how she came to write stories instead of novels because while she could put off her housework for three weeks, she just couldn’t for two years? Munro is our Cinderella.
But she is also, as Cynthia Ozick first said, our Chekov, as we can begin to make out in an interview Munro gave to The Paris Review about those early years:
When my oldest daughter was about two, she’d come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other. I’ve told her that. This was bad because, it made her the adversary to what was most important to me. I feel I have done everything backwards: this totally driven writer at the time when the kids were little and desperately needed me. And now, when they don’t need me at all, I love them so much. I moon around the house and think, There used to be a lot more family dinners.
Many of us have experienced the writing-mother struggle, but only Munro would tell it this way—reporting not only the hurtful batting away, but also that she told her daughter about it, and what happened as a result. We feel Munro’s regret. And then there is the skipping forward in time, the irony of what happened in the end, and the additional, different regret. It is layered and human and real, like a Munro story.
Of course, an actual Munro story on the theme of female aspiration and constraint might well involve a line like: “Home is where they cut you down to size.” Or: “Who Do You Think You Are?”—that question being the original, Canadian title of what would be published in America as The Beggar Maid. Munro’s early work was so raw and powerful that though it immediately attracted New Yorker editor Chip McGrath, it frightened his legendary boss, William Shawn. McGrath recalls Shawn’s surprise when he finally met Munro at the Algonquin Hotel, where he liked to lunch. “She is not at all what I expected, Mr. McGrath,” Shawn said—apparently expecting, said McGrath, “some kind of Canadian wild woman.” Instead Shawn was taken with this wholly modest and self-effacing writer who could maintain an intimate relationship with her small Ontario hometown even as she wrote the most unsparing stories about it.
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