'It's how we keep telling ourselves our stories'

“Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.” – Alice Munro

 

Born in Canada on this date in 1931 (she died in May of 2024) Nobel Prize winner Munro is noted for “revolutionizing the architecture of short stories,” especially with her tendency to move forward and backward in time.   Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade."

 

A frequent theme of Munro’s work, particularly in her early stories like 1971’s Lives of Girls and Women, she focuses on the dilemma of girls coming of age and their relationships with both their families and small-town life.  In her later works like Runaway, she shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, women alone, and the elderly.                             

                                       

Winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, she also was a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction.  Her last short story collection, Dear Life, came out in 2012 just before she was honored with the Nobel Prize.

 “A story is not like a road to follow . . . it’s more like a house,” Munro said.  “You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the rooms and corridors relate to each other; how the world outside is altered by being viewed from (each of) its windows.”