This side of the truth

In the Foreword she writes to her new book Alice Munro, Canada’s best known and most admired short story writer, states that some 10 or 12 years ago she began to study the history of her family and envisaged a memoir, unlike the fictions which have engaged her all her working life. She was thorough in her researches and unearthed a great deal of material, almost all of it in the Selkirk and Galashiels public libraries. She even spent some months in Scotland, where the Laidlaw branch of her family had its roots. She then attacked the subject but discovered that she was not merely the legatee of her own family but Alice Munro, writer of fiction, whose stories exist in their own right and appear to owe nothing to her ancestry.

In other words in trying to write fact she found that she was writing fiction; each imaginative excursion had its origins in some authentic family detail, and the result is a hybrid of the two genres. More than anything else it is an autobiography of sorts, perhaps the only one she will ever write. The depth of her feelings ensures that she pays loving attention to people she never knew, those hill farmers who sailed for the New World in the early 19th century and of whom little is known, their names being almost their only record.

It has to be said that other people’s remote ancestors, rather like other people’s dreams, are hard to get a grip on, and Munro runs the risk of coming across as merely sentimental. This is in sharp contrast to the delicacy she has always brought to her studies of attachments and misalliances. But, with her reputation assured, she no doubt felt free to indulge her own vagaries, and was perhaps happy to attack one sort of fiction rather than another.