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Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives.

Article Excerpt
Robert Thacker. Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. Toronto: McClelland, 2005. 604 pp. $39.99 cloth.

"There is always a starting point in reality," Alice Munro told an interviewer. In Robert Thacker's expansive biography of Munro, this is the key that unlocks the mysteries of both her story and her life:

In "Material," for instance, Munro wrote, "when I was pregnant with Clea we lived in a house on Argyle Street." When Alice Munro was pregnant with Sheila, she and Jim lived in a house on Argyle Street in Vancouver; a more recent story, "Cortes Island," has the young narrator, a new bride, living on Arbutus Street, where they lived before that. (6) Autobiography is embedded 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. (18-19)

With phrases such as "is derived directly" (24) or "remembering this house, or one very much like it"...

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