Thinly Veiled Autobiography

On vacation this week I'm reading a biography by Robert Thacker, titled Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. Alice Munro, of course, is the award-winning short story writer, who publishes most of her stories in the New Yorker, and has been called the Canadian Chekhov.

A central theme of the biography is the way that Munro's fiction draws on and parallels her own life experiences and history:

Probably no more than most professional writers of fiction, yet nonetheless very precisely and so verifiably, Alice Munro has drawn on the factual details of her life -- where she has been, who she has known, her roots, what has happened, how things have turned out -- in the fiction she has published. As she told Harry Boyle in 1974 and has freely admitted throughout her career, "There is always a starting point in reality." For Munro, those starting points are first noticed, then probed, and then sharply detailed as she intuitively articulates them. . . .

Following Munro's own pattern, this biography traces her life and career going from the fact to the fiction and back again. Autobiography is imbedded in Alice Munro's work, autobiography always resonant with fictional imaginings ("grafted on from some other reality"), and she can be seen as always "writing her lives," the lives she has both lived and imagined.

I'm fascinated with the way that Munro has taken license to write so recognizably about her own childhood, her parents, her home town of Wingham, her ancestors, her marriage ... I'm looking forward to seeing how she negotiated the personal nature of this material, both in transforming it into fiction, and in the way it affected her family and friends.

With my first book of fiction, Brick and Mortar, I deliberately avoided thinly veiled autobiography, because 1) I didn't want to be a typical author whose first book is a kunstlerroman about a girl growing up to be a writer; 2) I wanted to be a better writer before I dealt with personal material, so that the work I produced would do justice to the importance of the subject matter; and 3) I wanted to experiment with writing from many different characters' points-of-view, as a sort of apprenticeship. So while the church community of Brick and Mortar is rooted in my memories of churches past, the characters and their situations are largely imagined.

After I finished that book, I found myself drawn to my own and my mother's story more strongly. My next short story, "Broken Water," had that "starting point in reality" -- I did indeed come home from swimming lessons to find my mother in labour. These later stories are more moving for me as a writer, and I think that power derives from my deeply felt experiences, and hopefully transfers to the reader.

But I still have doubts from time to time. Is it cheating to draw so heavily on my own experience? Would it be more artistically rigorous for me to create entirely imagined stories? Am I giving away too much of myself? How will my family and friends respond?

I hope to find some answers to these questions in the story of Munro's writing life.

P.S. The friend who recommended Thacker's book to me said that she reread Munro's stories simultaneously, in the order and at the time they were mentioned in the biography. I love that idea, and I wish I had time to do the same. Someday ...