Robert Thacker felt Alice Munro was a writer to watch when he read his first story by her in Tamarack Review, a Canadian magazine, fifty years ago. “If this is what Canadian writing is,” he thought between his undergraduate and graduate degrees in English, “sign me up.”
Thank you for checking out the interview. All of my June Munro posts now have updated notes, the most substantial ones here on this page and on the Munro Memorial page linked above.
Thacker has been busy answering calls from major media outlets (though he did give me a prompt email reply amid his calls). He's been quite forthcoming in the last couple of days. I haven't ruled out another interview. Stay tuned.
Why, why, why didn't he write about the abuse of her daughter? He knew. Andrea wrote to him in 2005. He says the biography kept being updated but he didn't include Fremlin's conviction, the public letters? Sorry, that is a grave sin of omission and so infuriating.
Margaret, I saw that Thacker did address your question in interviews with newspaper reporters. I suspect the Washington Post did the best job of quoting him in his own voice (not cutting off too much), and I've referred to that in a new headnote at the top of the interview post. Everything I've read about the Munro siblings fills me with much admiration for their bond. The biographer who chooses to tell the more intimate family story will have much to say.
If he is writing about “the influence of her life on her acclaimed fiction” then it is curious he chose to leave her daughter’s abuse out when he does talk of Munro’s relatives, marriages, divorce, children and housework, all very intimate details. Already, we have analyses of where in Munro’s fiction we can see echoes of this terrible truth. His responses in Wapo only confirms the protective silence afforded to Munro by the literary world.
This is definitely a fair point. Another biographer with a broad “life and story” focus may well have included it in the revised edition.
For better or worse, it’s common for biographers during a writer’s life to leave out or step lightly around the worst personal details. Later biographers after a death tend to tell the story differently. I’m sure we’ll see that with Munro now.
I have questions, too. I think we may hear from him tomorrow through other news outlets. I’ll update my posts. I learned of it today. It’s awful. I’m glad the siblings are supporting her. I’m glad she feels free to speak.
Haha! I think I won’t start podcasting. I enjoyed this conversation, but it took a fair bit of time to work in another medium. I enjoy doing voiceovers when construction crews are not busy nearby, but I’ve tasted the complexity of media production and will keep my day job! ;-)
Being a guest for you sounds much nicer than being a regular host myself. I’m happy to drop into Studio Kate any time.
After COVID-19 (which seems like eons ago yet I am one of the few still affected) balancing between home life, work life, social life, and hobbies all merged and became an overwhelming mess of trying to balance one act with another. In this sense, I could relate to Alice, but I know what she managed to do was a lot more courage and required a lot more effort as a woman in a time when traditional roles were set to the extreme. It makes her stories lovable, knowing how and where she wrote them, and makes me look forward to reading.
It's hard for me to wrap my head around the choice she made to leave B.C. for Ontario in the 1970s, with her youngest daughter still in elementary school. Under the awards were some very hard choices. It puts our own in perspective - how no choice is going to be perfect. COVID-19 took many of our expectations down a few pegs, I think - at least. I hope the memorial posts gave you some good idea of where you'd like begin with Munro. If you haven't seen Peter Meilaedner's post on the memorial page, he too is a scholar and a newcomer to Munro who commented about the experience of reading his first book by her. His perspective might be companionable. I so appreciate your comments this morning!
I had the opportunity to listen today Tara and I LOVED hearing Robert's stories. And his description at the end of how you need to allow her stories to flow over you. It's so true. It was also affirming. So much of what I wrote about in my post about Alice, as a late bloomer to her writing, seemed to be reflected in this interview. This made me feel better. Like I wasn't completely missing the mark as a reader of Munro. Albeit very late to the party!
You're so *not* late! Munro herself was late! Took nearly 20 years to make the blasted first book, and even then, her publisher and radio friend Weaver hauled it out of her while she thought she needed a novel. If there's one writer I think we don't have to feel rushed to, it's this one. No rush at all. Didn't you say you want to take a break after a story, not rush through them? I feel that way, too.
Glad you enjoyed the interview! He has accumulated wonderful anecdotes over the years.
Yes, that's exactly what I said. I had to sit with them afterwards. There was definitely no rushing to read the next one. Each one needed room and time to breathe after I finished. Sometimes because I had to marvel and say to myself "did that just happen?" or "What just happened?" I'm so excited that I have so much to look forward to. I think another book of hers that I have on hold is coming to me very soon from the library. Oh yes, I also spoke to the library folks yesterday and they are going to order in both Robert's book and Sheila's. So, thanks for those recommendations. I'll get to them eventually too.
Watched while preparing dinner and felt some comradery with Alice, who was always balancing home and family and her wonderful writing. Thank you and Robert for this - I know very little about Alice's life and am now even more excited to read her work.
Thank you for reading, Amy. I feel I can relate to her, too. Glad to support that sense of fellowship! The Munro memorial post linked at the top and bottom of this post has 1-line quotations from other essays in case you want to choose a companion or two into your reading of Munro. My Monday post will give a little more guidance about who might enjoy what, from the posts available. There are some wonderful essays to choose from.
Great to hear Bob in this space and to learn more of the back story of his biography. What a privilege to have had that direct connection -- that relationship -- with such a writer!
It's rather humorous that the divorce story -- something you and I both want to understand better, I think -- seems to be exactly the story that Bob doesn't want to tell. Kind of hilarious. Good job trying to circle back to that, though. I'll confess that I'm still a little mystified as to how the marriage faltered, particularly when Jim and Alice were working together on the bookstore and he was supportive of her work. 20 years is a long time for something to suddenly falter, so there had to have been more to that story? Was it really just cumulative domestic labor inequity?
These are not incidental questions for writers today. I think a lot of us as professionals are always trying to have it all, trying to gauge how committed we are to the craft, what we're willing to give up in private life to support that dedication. Munro is a reminder that you can grind along imperfectly and still end up somewhere profound, even if you're not obsessed or obsessive about it. But I wonder if her story might prove that to really devote yourself to the craft, you have to give up some things? It's hard to be married to someone who has that perpetual need to create, whose first love might always be the written word. It's the kind of thing that maybe neither the writer nor her husband might have understood early in their relationship, a kind of reality that might have gradually clarified over twenty years: what the top priorities were, how what they wanted from life began to diverge.
But am I right that their parting was -- and remained -- largely amicable? Also quite an achievement in those days. In any day.
In interviews that I've heard, Munro spoke about marriage as something women of her generation simply did; thus, she implies that the divorce was a process of outgrowing her originally limiting views of herself and marriage.
In one of her stories (hopefully someone will come along here and remind me which one!), a divorced mother lives in Toronto, and her daughter comes to stay with her for a summer and doesn't like the new life, so she's back on the train (I think to B.C.) sooner than expected to the home she misses. I don't know if that's what happened for Andrea, but the story helps me understand what might have happened. I think it's the same story where the husband and daughter both (baffled and confused) ask the wife to come home. Ouch. IRL, it seems to have taken three years, 1972-1975, for the separation process to occur between B.C. and Ontario. That makes sense for such a big family split.
I don't know the details as well as Bob, but I think Munro trusted him as much as she did because he respected the family's privacy while still finding 600 pages worth talking about, and still telling the truth.
I understand that the split was amicable. Bob will come along in a couple of hours, and I'll see if he has more to say.
Here's more. If you can get your hands on Bob's biography of Munro, there is a searing scene on p 106 - a handwritten draft that he found in her archive at Calgary - when a character looks at her wedding photo (which sounds very like the Munro wedding photo, with bride and groom the same age) and disparages it. "Our attitudes to the undertaking are reflected in our faces -- his stricken but shining with conviction, mine pale, resolute, sullen. Our parents on either side look uncomfortable." And so on. This feels like Munro looking back on how much her own inner life has changed. She's grown far from the 20-year-old who married because it was the thing to do.
Also, in Kim Van Bruggen's post (in the Reader section of the memorial) there is an appropos quotation. When a woman's children are grown, "They don’t hate her. For going away or staying away. They don’t forgive her, either. Perhaps they wouldn’t have forgiven her anyway, but it would have been for something different.”
It sounds like the split was hard at first, as is often the case.
How interesting. In that way, perhaps Munro's path parallels Elizabeth Warren's? I remember being just dumbstruck at how someone so competent and authoritative could have once thought of marriage as the natural outgrowth of "He picked me." It shows how quickly some of these attitudes have changed, even if the old ruts remain beneath the surface.
But as I'm rewatching "Northern Exposure," I'm seeing so many of those same assumptions, even under the guise of the "anything goes" 90s. I really hope our kids have an easier time of it! How difficult to know as a young person what you'll need 10-20 years from then, how much you might have changed. How difficult to make any kind of promise until death do you part.
Thank you, Kalpana! I'm a reader of transcripts, myself, so I enjoyed editing the transcript so it would read like an essay. We had a wonderfully wide-ranging conversation.
well, that didn't age well. Mazel Tov.
maybe interview him now. he deserves it more than that award he got in late 2023.
Thank you for checking out the interview. All of my June Munro posts now have updated notes, the most substantial ones here on this page and on the Munro Memorial page linked above.
Thacker has been busy answering calls from major media outlets (though he did give me a prompt email reply amid his calls). He's been quite forthcoming in the last couple of days. I haven't ruled out another interview. Stay tuned.
Why, why, why didn't he write about the abuse of her daughter? He knew. Andrea wrote to him in 2005. He says the biography kept being updated but he didn't include Fremlin's conviction, the public letters? Sorry, that is a grave sin of omission and so infuriating.
Margaret, I saw that Thacker did address your question in interviews with newspaper reporters. I suspect the Washington Post did the best job of quoting him in his own voice (not cutting off too much), and I've referred to that in a new headnote at the top of the interview post. Everything I've read about the Munro siblings fills me with much admiration for their bond. The biographer who chooses to tell the more intimate family story will have much to say.
If he is writing about “the influence of her life on her acclaimed fiction” then it is curious he chose to leave her daughter’s abuse out when he does talk of Munro’s relatives, marriages, divorce, children and housework, all very intimate details. Already, we have analyses of where in Munro’s fiction we can see echoes of this terrible truth. His responses in Wapo only confirms the protective silence afforded to Munro by the literary world.
This is definitely a fair point. Another biographer with a broad “life and story” focus may well have included it in the revised edition.
For better or worse, it’s common for biographers during a writer’s life to leave out or step lightly around the worst personal details. Later biographers after a death tend to tell the story differently. I’m sure we’ll see that with Munro now.
I have questions, too. I think we may hear from him tomorrow through other news outlets. I’ll update my posts. I learned of it today. It’s awful. I’m glad the siblings are supporting her. I’m glad she feels free to speak.
Oh Tara, I look forward to your podcast! :) This was really a treat.
PS If you don't want to start one, please be a guest on mine when I change things up in a few months. 🙏
Haha! I think I won’t start podcasting. I enjoyed this conversation, but it took a fair bit of time to work in another medium. I enjoy doing voiceovers when construction crews are not busy nearby, but I’ve tasted the complexity of media production and will keep my day job! ;-)
Being a guest for you sounds much nicer than being a regular host myself. I’m happy to drop into Studio Kate any time.
Woo 🤗 that would be great!
(Also, I hear you!)
After COVID-19 (which seems like eons ago yet I am one of the few still affected) balancing between home life, work life, social life, and hobbies all merged and became an overwhelming mess of trying to balance one act with another. In this sense, I could relate to Alice, but I know what she managed to do was a lot more courage and required a lot more effort as a woman in a time when traditional roles were set to the extreme. It makes her stories lovable, knowing how and where she wrote them, and makes me look forward to reading.
It's hard for me to wrap my head around the choice she made to leave B.C. for Ontario in the 1970s, with her youngest daughter still in elementary school. Under the awards were some very hard choices. It puts our own in perspective - how no choice is going to be perfect. COVID-19 took many of our expectations down a few pegs, I think - at least. I hope the memorial posts gave you some good idea of where you'd like begin with Munro. If you haven't seen Peter Meilaedner's post on the memorial page, he too is a scholar and a newcomer to Munro who commented about the experience of reading his first book by her. His perspective might be companionable. I so appreciate your comments this morning!
I had the opportunity to listen today Tara and I LOVED hearing Robert's stories. And his description at the end of how you need to allow her stories to flow over you. It's so true. It was also affirming. So much of what I wrote about in my post about Alice, as a late bloomer to her writing, seemed to be reflected in this interview. This made me feel better. Like I wasn't completely missing the mark as a reader of Munro. Albeit very late to the party!
You're so *not* late! Munro herself was late! Took nearly 20 years to make the blasted first book, and even then, her publisher and radio friend Weaver hauled it out of her while she thought she needed a novel. If there's one writer I think we don't have to feel rushed to, it's this one. No rush at all. Didn't you say you want to take a break after a story, not rush through them? I feel that way, too.
Glad you enjoyed the interview! He has accumulated wonderful anecdotes over the years.
Yes, that's exactly what I said. I had to sit with them afterwards. There was definitely no rushing to read the next one. Each one needed room and time to breathe after I finished. Sometimes because I had to marvel and say to myself "did that just happen?" or "What just happened?" I'm so excited that I have so much to look forward to. I think another book of hers that I have on hold is coming to me very soon from the library. Oh yes, I also spoke to the library folks yesterday and they are going to order in both Robert's book and Sheila's. So, thanks for those recommendations. I'll get to them eventually too.
Oh good!
Watched while preparing dinner and felt some comradery with Alice, who was always balancing home and family and her wonderful writing. Thank you and Robert for this - I know very little about Alice's life and am now even more excited to read her work.
Thank you for reading, Amy. I feel I can relate to her, too. Glad to support that sense of fellowship! The Munro memorial post linked at the top and bottom of this post has 1-line quotations from other essays in case you want to choose a companion or two into your reading of Munro. My Monday post will give a little more guidance about who might enjoy what, from the posts available. There are some wonderful essays to choose from.
Oh that’s wonderful - thank you!
Putting this in the queue to listen to later. Can hardly wait.
I learned a lot! :-)
Great to hear Bob in this space and to learn more of the back story of his biography. What a privilege to have had that direct connection -- that relationship -- with such a writer!
It's rather humorous that the divorce story -- something you and I both want to understand better, I think -- seems to be exactly the story that Bob doesn't want to tell. Kind of hilarious. Good job trying to circle back to that, though. I'll confess that I'm still a little mystified as to how the marriage faltered, particularly when Jim and Alice were working together on the bookstore and he was supportive of her work. 20 years is a long time for something to suddenly falter, so there had to have been more to that story? Was it really just cumulative domestic labor inequity?
These are not incidental questions for writers today. I think a lot of us as professionals are always trying to have it all, trying to gauge how committed we are to the craft, what we're willing to give up in private life to support that dedication. Munro is a reminder that you can grind along imperfectly and still end up somewhere profound, even if you're not obsessed or obsessive about it. But I wonder if her story might prove that to really devote yourself to the craft, you have to give up some things? It's hard to be married to someone who has that perpetual need to create, whose first love might always be the written word. It's the kind of thing that maybe neither the writer nor her husband might have understood early in their relationship, a kind of reality that might have gradually clarified over twenty years: what the top priorities were, how what they wanted from life began to diverge.
But am I right that their parting was -- and remained -- largely amicable? Also quite an achievement in those days. In any day.
In interviews that I've heard, Munro spoke about marriage as something women of her generation simply did; thus, she implies that the divorce was a process of outgrowing her originally limiting views of herself and marriage.
In one of her stories (hopefully someone will come along here and remind me which one!), a divorced mother lives in Toronto, and her daughter comes to stay with her for a summer and doesn't like the new life, so she's back on the train (I think to B.C.) sooner than expected to the home she misses. I don't know if that's what happened for Andrea, but the story helps me understand what might have happened. I think it's the same story where the husband and daughter both (baffled and confused) ask the wife to come home. Ouch. IRL, it seems to have taken three years, 1972-1975, for the separation process to occur between B.C. and Ontario. That makes sense for such a big family split.
I don't know the details as well as Bob, but I think Munro trusted him as much as she did because he respected the family's privacy while still finding 600 pages worth talking about, and still telling the truth.
I understand that the split was amicable. Bob will come along in a couple of hours, and I'll see if he has more to say.
Here's more. If you can get your hands on Bob's biography of Munro, there is a searing scene on p 106 - a handwritten draft that he found in her archive at Calgary - when a character looks at her wedding photo (which sounds very like the Munro wedding photo, with bride and groom the same age) and disparages it. "Our attitudes to the undertaking are reflected in our faces -- his stricken but shining with conviction, mine pale, resolute, sullen. Our parents on either side look uncomfortable." And so on. This feels like Munro looking back on how much her own inner life has changed. She's grown far from the 20-year-old who married because it was the thing to do.
Also, in Kim Van Bruggen's post (in the Reader section of the memorial) there is an appropos quotation. When a woman's children are grown, "They don’t hate her. For going away or staying away. They don’t forgive her, either. Perhaps they wouldn’t have forgiven her anyway, but it would have been for something different.”
It sounds like the split was hard at first, as is often the case.
How interesting. In that way, perhaps Munro's path parallels Elizabeth Warren's? I remember being just dumbstruck at how someone so competent and authoritative could have once thought of marriage as the natural outgrowth of "He picked me." It shows how quickly some of these attitudes have changed, even if the old ruts remain beneath the surface.
But as I'm rewatching "Northern Exposure," I'm seeing so many of those same assumptions, even under the guise of the "anything goes" 90s. I really hope our kids have an easier time of it! How difficult to know as a young person what you'll need 10-20 years from then, how much you might have changed. How difficult to make any kind of promise until death do you part.
I think the old ruts are not far below the surface at all. Sadly.
Begun reading it and I’m loving it!!!
Thank you, Kalpana! I'm a reader of transcripts, myself, so I enjoyed editing the transcript so it would read like an essay. We had a wonderfully wide-ranging conversation.