In the end I really did enjoy these stories except for the first one and since I read that last even that didn't seem quite so bad. They were kind of memoir but not really.
I"ll let Munro explain what she meant...this is from her foreward when she talks about what she was doing in these stories:
"I was doing something closer to what a memoir does --exploring a life, my own life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the centre and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality...In fact, some of these characters have moved so far from their beginnings that I cannot remember who they were to start with."
Sounds very like the Munro we know, doesn't it? Reading these stories has made me pick up the biography Robert Thacker wrote last year. It is a rather heavy tome and I'm not that keen on biography but I think I'll try going through some of it.
Alice at 2 or 3 years old. Photo in the biography.
