A newspaper once called Alice Munro the least praised good writer; then came the Nobel
In 1961 the Vancouver Sun profiled a young mother under the headline Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories. Alice Munro wrote in stolen moments while her husband minded the children, and stuck with short stories because novels needed time she lacked. In 2013 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Alice Laidlaw grew up in rural Wingham, Ontario, born in 1931 in the depths of the Depression. Her father farmed foxes and mink and later turkeys; her mother, a former teacher, was controlling, more so after developing Parkinson's in the early 1940s, and young Alice was often beaten by her father at her mother's urging. She began writing as a teenager and published her first story in 1950 while studying at the University of Western Ontario on a scholarship, picking tobacco and waiting tables to get by.
She left university in 1951 to marry James Munro and moved to West Vancouver. They had four daughters, one of whom died on the day she was born. In 1963 the couple opened Munro's Books in Victoria, which still trades. Alice chafed at suburban life, later describing its permitted opinions and permitted ways of being a woman, and the marriage ended in 1972.
Most of her fiction is set in Huron County in southwestern Ontario, written in plain, precise prose that moves backward and forward through time, often in linked story cycles. She won Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction three times, the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for her body of work, and the Nobel four years later, around when she stopped writing.
Back in Ontario she married Gerald Fremlin, a retired geographer, in 1976. Family members and friends, including Margaret Atwood, described him as controlling and Munro as heavily dependent on him. Two months after Munro's death, her daughter Andrea Skinner revealed that Fremlin had sexually abused her as a child from 1976; Munro learned of it in 1992 and stayed with him. The disclosure has prompted a reassessment of her legacy. Munro had lived with dementia for at least 12 years and died at home in Port Hope on 13 May 2024, aged 92.
Source: Alice Munro
