Chloe Schama reviews Alice Munro's new collection of short stories, Dear Life, the last three of which she describes "closer to my own life than the other stories I had written." After a lifetime of making things up, the forays into near-autobiography presented their own challenges:
When truth is stranger than fiction, how should the writer preserve her subtlety? "If I was writing fiction instead of remembering something that happened," Munro writes, in her description of the prostitute from "Voices," "I would never have given her that dress. A kind of advertisement she didn’t need." The prostitute wore "golden-orange taffeta"; Munro the fiction-writer would have had her in olive silk. In another story, the collective failings and misfortunes of her hapless father seem too woeful to be credible: "You would think that this was just too much. The business gone, my mother’s health going. It wouldn’t do in fiction." Even when she is hewing close to personal history, she is conscious of the particular kind of truth required by fiction—perfect pitch and proportion, and perhaps less verisimilitude.
According to Anne Enright, "a kind of absence is essential to Munro's work," the keeping of a distance between writer and reader, so she finds herself grateful for these more personal stories' "insight into Munro's formation as a writer":
It would be wrong to say there is an absence at the heart of it – that would sound aggrieved – but there is nothing wrong with holding yourself a little in reserve. A slight sense of withholding gives Munro's prose its gracefulness, and allows intimacy without danger. After many years, many collections and many wonderful stories, readers may feel they know everything about Alice Munro, especially as so many of her characters lead lives similar to her own. In fact, we know very little about her. This is one of the reasons readers become dizzy with love for Munro. This other reason is that she is so damn good.
Read one of Munro's short stories from the collection here.
The Dish 