Alice Munro

Alice Ann Munro (10 July 1931 – 13 May 2024) was a Canadian author, primarily of short stories. The recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, she won the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. Munro was a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction.

Quotes

People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.
And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong.
- "Friend of My Youth", in Friend of My Youth (1990)

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
- Open Secrets (1994)

A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
- Selected Stories, 1968-1994 (1996)

This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all.
The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.
This is what happens.
Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.
- Runaway (2004)

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.
- "Too Much Happiness", in Too Much Happiness (2009)

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.
- "Too Much Happiness", in Too Much Happiness (2009)

She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood: that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.
- "Too Much Happiness", in Too Much Happiness (2009)

'The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you're just there, going along easy in the world.'
- Dear Life (2012)

Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.
- Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014 (2014)

I want my stories to move people, I don’t care if they are men or women or children. I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn’t that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn’t mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.
- Nobel Lecture in absentia, by Alice Munro (2013)

Alice Munro's Open Secrets is so liberating and exciting for any new story writer to feel her open textures, her bold reach, her plainness, with no showing off, no special effects. She reminds us that there's no formula for a story, it can be as loosely woven as you like, as long as the inner logic works organically. Easier said of course, much easier said, than done.
- Tessa Hadley interview quoted here

In 1976, I went to visit my mother, Alice Munro, for the summer at her home in Clinton, Ont. One night, while she was away, her husband, my stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, climbed into the bed where I was sleeping and sexually assaulted me. I was nine years old.
[Some time later, after his actions became known] Meanwhile, Fremlin acted quickly. He told my mother he would kill me if I ever went to the police, and wrote letters to my family, blaming me for the abuse.
In spite of the letters and threats, my mother went back to Fremlin, and stayed with him until he died in 2013. She said that she had been "told too late," she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.
- Andrea Robin Skinner "My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him", Toronto Star (7 July 2024).
- Fremlin pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting his stepdaughter (at some point in July or August 1976) in March 2005 and was given a suspended sentence and two years' probation. He was then 80-years old.