The Decibel - Alice Munro, remembered
Episode Date: May 18, 2024The celebrated Canadian author Alice Munro died on May 13. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 as a “master of the contemporary short story,” and the Man Booker International Pr...ize in 2009.On today’s show, members of The Globe newsroom share their reflections on Alice Munro’s life and work, and columnist Marsha Lederman joins to talk about Munro’s impact and legacy.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at thedecibel@globeandmail.com
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Alice Munro died on Monday, May 13th, at the age of 92.
She was one of the world's most renowned Canadian authors, and certainly one of its most influential.
Munro published 14 best-selling collections of short stories, the first in 1968,
and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2013, the first
Canadian to win the award for literature.
She also won two Giller Prizes, three Governor General's Awards, and the Man Booker International
Prize.
Today on the show, you'll hear from people at The Globe about what Alice Munro and her
work meant to them.
And then I'll be speaking with columnist and former arts correspondent Marsha Lederman about the impact Alice Munro had on both of us.
I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail.
Here's what Globe columnist Gary Mason shared with us about Alice Munro.
Back in 1977, my wife Barbara was a third-year English student at the University of British Columbia.
The subject in her Canlac class that year was the book Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro.
Barb had some questions for the author, who by then was living in Clinton, Ontario. Was the book autobiographical, she wondered. Were the stories
in it true? Did it take long to write? Barb located a copy of Canadian Who's Who in the campus library,
which included contact information for the author. That February, a letter arrived at Barr's parents' home.
Dated February 17, 1977, it began,
Your letter delighted me. I'm always glad if Live stands up to the rereading.
When you present a book to the world, it's not just a piece of work, but a whole attitude you
present. It's a way of seeing things and when people accept or reject it,
that is really what they're dealing with. Monroe went on to say that lives was autobiographical,
but most incidents in it were invented. She said, quote, the scene at the dance hall takes my own
feeling and experiences of such dances and builds a scene to show that." My wife was ecstatic to
receive the correspondence. She wasn't expecting it. It would be the start of a
lifelong admiration for Monroe, her favorite author. And that letter, well, it
would be treasured like bullion and read again and again and again over the years.
And, of course, we still have it.
This is from Lisanne Jutra, a copy editor at The Globe.
It's hard to think of one thing about Alice Munro to remember or to highlight in tribute. But what I am thinking about is what
stays with me is the way that she conveyed the spirit of place in what I think of as capital
O, old Ontario. This place that was trying to be a good little commonwealth that was still very
protestantly restrictive and concerned with propriety. And I just see Monroe as peeling
back the layers, revealing this very human vulgarity underneath it all. And she does it with such a great sense of humor.
And she also does it, I mean, it's also deadly serious.
What she does is she taps into a kind of honesty.
And if you have any nose for bullshit,
you 100% know that Alice Monroe is the real deal. She is not posturing. She really,
she's such a fidelity to the truth of life. And I love that. I can say that I haven't read a lot of her, partly that is because the writing is so rich, but also because truly,
when I started to read her, I would get these kind of waves of anguish,
of anguish, because I knew that I could never write that well.
And this is from Adrian Lee, an editor in the opinion section.
So with Alice Munro, people talk a lot about time,
her ability to write about time,
to really capture the feeling of time passing. That really is a big part of why I
loved her story, The Bear Came Over the Mountain. And it takes me back to a moment in time for me
when my grandmother was going through dementia, which is really what this story is about,
about a woman in her final years in a care home and her husband navigating kind of that relationship.
You know, it really took me back in those sort of precise Monroe-esque details of what it was like to have a loved one with dementia, with Alzheimer's.
In particular, there was this one part that I think about a lot where, you know, her husband, Fiona's husband, Grant, is driving
her to the care home. And it was something along the lines of he wanted to take her home just
because she had had this wave of clarity, this feeling of actually she understood everything.
She had this vivid memory. And that resonated with me. And, you know, in grade 12, I had this remarkable conversation with my grandmother, who by that point was in sort of year two of her battle with Alzheimer's.
And she had asked me such precise questions about a friend of mine from school as I was waiting to get a ride to school.
And I just sort of thought all of a sudden, maybe everything's
fine. Maybe, maybe things are okay. And the hope that gave me and how hard it was to move past that
hope when, you know, four years later, she, she did pass away from that disease. So just those
details, the, the way that she can transport you to time to control time, but also with,
with such precision, tell us something
that rings so true.
We'll be right back.
Marcia, thank you for being here.
Oh, thank you so much for asking me to have this conversation with you.
I'm looking forward to it, and I'm going to try not to cry.
You know what?
Same for me then, because when I heard the news, it really struck me because I'd read so much Monroe,. It meant so much to me over the years, too.
So I guess I'd just like to start by asking you, you know, when you heard the news that
Alice Monroe had died this week, what went through your mind?
I won't say I was surprised.
I knew she wasn't in great health.
I knew she was older.
Of course, I was sad. She has contributed so much, not just to the literature of this country
and the world, but so much to my own life. And of course, what has happened since I heard the news
is I've been rereading her stories. And it has been the most extraordinary thing for me to be able to re-experience her work,
which, you know, I've read, but not recently.
And it was so, it feels like it's been a gift.
I hate to say that something positive came out of something terrible,
but it's been a beautiful few days for me with her work. What about you?
Because I know, I mean, you're a fiction writer, right? So she must have been so important to you.
Well, I don't want to assume anything, but... No, she was. And I read her for the first time
when I was in second year university.
I was trying to remember back.
I initially thought it was Lives of Girls and Women, but it was actually Who Do You Think You Are?
I'm pretty sure.
And I remember I was so struck by that book when we were doing it in class. It seemed so simple because all of her stories I find seem really simple from the outset.
But all of a sudden you realize there's just like
layers of emotion and interactions that are so subtle. And, you know, that's something that
I think it's really hard to do, honestly, in writing, right? It's really hard to kind of have
that level of craft and subtlety when creating a story and to be so visceral with the emotional
impact because her stories really,
I always find like they really hit you, even though, you know, on the surface, they're
about very ordinary, simple things, right? Yeah, she wasn't at all showy. That was an
amazing thing about her. And yet the writing, it packs such a punch, right? As you say, it was simple, but oh, it was so layered and there was
so much there. And with every story, you became so invested in these characters in a way that
sometimes I'm not even invested when I read a whole novel. Every story, I was thinking,
is she going to ask me what was my favorite Alice Monroe story? And maybe you were going to, but I don't have an answer. My answer is going to be,
it's the last one I read. Whenever I read her, the story is so explosive in terms of how it
affects me that I think this has to be the best. This one, this Monroe story has to be the best. And also, I also
think Who Do You Think You Are was the first collection of hers that I read. I was trying to
figure it out this week. And what I did was go to my bookshelf and it's, I've got a really old copy
of it. And I see that I've got stuff underlined and highlighted. So I must have read it in school as well as maybe a teenager.
It might have been actually in high school for me, or maybe it was early university.
But yeah, it's a really old, beat up, well-loved copy.
So you said you've been kind of rereading her work this week as you've been thinking
about her.
What was the story that you went to first?
So when you were pulling out the books from your shelf, what was the first
Monroe story that you cracked open? So the very first one I cracked open,
and I wrote about this in an essay for The Globe, was I cracked it open because there was a 50 cent
Canadian tire piece of money marking it. I've got it right here. And it's so Canadian.
It's like the most Canadian moment ever. And the story and I'm not even sure if I'm pronouncing
it correctly, but it's Amundsen or Amundsen. I don't know. A-M-U-N-D-S-E-N from Dear Life. And I thought, what was it that made me leave that bookmark in there?
So I reread the story. It was the first one I reread. And it's, oh my gosh. Okay, now this is
the part where I might cry. It's about a woman who goes to teach at a TB sanatorium in Ontario, Northern Ontario, and meets the school doctor. He woos
her. They go off to Huntsville to get married. And spoiler alert, he changes his mind while
they're there. And I was devastated again at reading this. I read it on Tuesday. And I cared so much about that woman's heartbreak. And I became so invested in whether she recovered from it as an adult. And reading that she had married gave me such comfort. But then reading that she and her husband were having some troubles
gave me so much concern. And, you know, this is over, I don't know, 15, 20 pages.
So it's, yeah, that was the first one I went to.
Yeah, I remember that story. And the thing that I really remember about that story is
how at first, you know, you're kind of going along and all of a sudden, I don't know, a few pages in, I realized the same kind of investment that I'm like, I'm really engaged in what is happening to this woman and what she's choosing to do or what, you know, what choices are being made for her, how she's navigating that. And I also viscerally remember being able to kind of picture these places,
even though, you know, I don't really know what Monroe was picturing, but I could see kind of
the Huntsville, you know, that wild part of Ontario there, you know, the little buildings,
it just seemed so clear to me, even though, you know, as you say, it's a short story,
you're only engaging with that for a short amount of time, but it's so visceral. Yeah, he dumps her basically, dumps her in the parking lot of a hardware store, outside a hardware store.
And I could picture this scene in my head.
And then he drives her to the train and she's sitting on the train going back to Toronto, her whole life in a whirl of ups and downs from the last few hours. And
she's still wearing the pretty green dress that she changed into when she thought she was about
to get married in it. And yes, I could see it all and feel it all. Yeah. And this is something
that's, you know, a lot of readers have talked about with
Alice Monroe that, you know, she's writing short stories, but it doesn't feel short. It feels like
the emotion and the intricacies that she packs into it. It feels like you're reading novels and
full stories really of these people's lives, but she manages to do it in such a short number of
pages. It's really quite incredible. But for a long time, she wasn't quite seen as equal to a novelist because we always kind of hold up novelists as
the epitome of writing. But the short story, she really did something so magical with that.
Early in her career, and this was one of the stories I heard this week from Douglas Gibson,
who was her longtime publisher and editor, people were telling her, well,
now you have to write a novel. You've got to write a novel. Enough with these short stories,
write a novel. And he said to her, no, this is your talent. This is what you do.
And so, she kept on with the short story, thank goodness. You know, I know that it's Lives of Girls and Women that
sometimes called a novel, but it's really a short story, a collection of connected short stories.
And I think it was probably called a novel for marketing purposes, but I never saw it that way.
Yeah. The other story that I was thinking about, this is one of her stories that really sticks out in my mind, is Miles City, Montana, which I think a lot of Monroe fans also really know very, very well.
And this is about a, you know, again, very simple idea about a family taking a road trip and this incident with the girls in the pool where one almost drowns.
And it's just like these very simple moments.
And, you know, this family is just kind of carrying on afterwards. They get in the car where one almost drowns. And it's just like these very simple moments. And, you know,
this family's just kind of carrying on afterwards, they get in the car, right? And you realize kind of, yeah, this is, you know, in a way, she's really describing kind of how life unfolds,
something happens, and, you know, you take it as it is, and, you know, you're affected by it,
but you got to keep going on. And it just that that one really, I was thinking about that one
a lot this week, because that really stood out in my mind.
So the last story I read before talking to you and it was just this morning, I just finished it a few minutes before we began talking was, you know, one that I think a lot of people think about with Monroe, which is the bear came over the mountain.
And that's not such a simple one.
Like that's a real,
there's a real plot there. I mean, they all have plots, but this one is,
and for anyone who's listening, the Sarah Pauly film Away From Her is adapted from the story.
And you've got the couple where the woman has dementia. She goes into a nursing home.
The husband can't visit her for a month. He goes and visits her after a month and she's taken up
with another man. And then what happens tells it with such efficiency, with hints and
like such clarity, but without spelling it out, that to me is one of her greatest gifts.
And that's difficult to do as a writer, of course.
Yes. Okay. Can I ask you a question?
Sure. You can turn the tables on me.
Since you're a writer of fiction, as we have already established, was Alice Munro or has Alice Munro been influential for you and your writing?
I would say she definitely has.
Yeah, like when I was mentioning I read her in university, it really made me think about how you do that, how you get emotion into, you know, seemingly
simplistic story. And, you know, her sentences aren't always complex. They're, you know,
they're very straightforward, but there's so many layers beneath that about the interactions that
are happening. So it really made me think about how you do that, how you are able to construct
that. And then actually, it's funny. So a few years after I first read Alice Munro, and then I'd read a bunch of her other stories, I applied. There's an Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story in Southern Ontario every year. And I applied for that. And I won, it's like a youth award. It was for someone in their 20s. It was an award sponsored by the Toronto Arts and Letters Club. And yeah, so I got to go to the festival in Wingham, Ontario, where Monroe is from.
And that was like a real, that's a real boost to a writer, because just to kind of have that,
you know, your name next to someone like Alice Monroe, that's a really exciting thing. And it
kind of gave me more encouragement to, you know, to keep going and to keep figuring out how to construct stories like this.
Isn't that amazing?
I read that in that collection of memories that Globe staff have had about Alice Munro
and her work.
And I was applauding you quietly from my computer in Vancouver.
But it is amazing how, you know, that kind of inspiration. I mean,
not all of us can win an award named after Alice Monroe. So that's huge. But I was thinking this
morning about while reading her stories, and then I went to get a cup of tea, and I was in my kitchen
and thinking, how would Alice Monroe describe me getting this cup of tea in one
of her stories that would, in some way, explain something about me? Is it the fact that my tea
is lined up in a certain way in the cupboard or the fact that I like to stir the milk in a certain
way? Would she do that? And what would that say about me?
I just, I think we've all been affected by her in all kinds of strange and untold ways.
Yeah, that's an amazing thought to think about what I'm doing and how that might be
perceived by a writer like her, how she would construct that, right, in a moment of story. Yeah. What detail would she choose about that action that would say something about me,
her character? Just lastly, Marsha, you know, if someone has never read an Alice Munro story,
but they're hearing about her this week, they may be interested in picking one up,
what book or what story would you recommend that they should start with? Oh my gosh. Okay. I do love
Dear Life. That's her last collection. Oh gosh, there was a story I read this week that I
absolutely loved. And of course, now I can't remember the name of it, but I'm going to tell
you because I'm going to find it. And while I find it, I'm going to tell you a different story. Laurie Moore, who is another one of my favorite writers
and who also writes amazing short stories,
wrote this week about Alice Munro, as many people have,
and said that she never got to meet her.
And she thought that that was a good thing
because she knew her.
She felt she knew her through her writing. And I think that's
something that we all feel who have read and loved Alice Munro so deeply. Okay. The story that I want
to recommend is called What is Remembered? What is Remembered?
What is Remembered? And I'm not sure which collection it
came from because I read it on the New Yorker website. Let's see if we can quickly find it.
What is? It is a story about something that happens to a woman, an encounter, Unexpected and how that one encounter stays with her her whole life.
It is a beautiful, intense and unforgettable piece of writing, even though I forgot the title, despite the fact that it's called What is Remembered.
There is some irony there. Yes. And that story, it sounds like it's in the collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. So that's one of the stories in
that collection, which is right there. You've got it in your room there.
Yes, I do. Yes. What is remembered, page 217.
What is remembered. Wonderful. Marcia, this was so great to get to talk to you about this. Thank
you so much for being here and for sharing your memories of Alice Munro.
Thanks so much. Thanks for asking for sharing your memories of Alice Monroe.
Thanks so much. Thanks for asking. I really, I really appreciate having had this conversation.
I'm glad we got to do this.
That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our intern is Aja Sauter. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin.
David Crosby edits the show.
Adrian Cheung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor.
Thank you so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.