Four easy pieces: Why Munro's fiction v her "memoirs"

As has been widely reported, the last four "stories" in Alice Munro's latest collection, Dear Life, are more like pieces of a memoir: Munro's unusual note in the book describes them as largely factual and true, and as probably the only autobiographical pieces she will ever write. Having read them, I have to say that, other than the title piece "Dear Life," they are not wholly satisfying. (In fact, would these four pieces be of such interest if we were not reading them seeking clues as to who the "real" Munro is?) Munro is not a memoirist; she evidently has no desire to explicitly write the story of her life, and in these pieces she seems to keep bumping up against the strictures of the form. The pieces are tiny little fragments of her life - animosity toward younger sister, visit to a local dance with her mother that they leave when her mother realizes one of the women there is "loose" - and each of the pieces has insights into Munro's character and personality and family history (it has never been so clear that her mother and father had such different personalities and temperaments, the school teacher and the mink farmer). But, in the end, we know so much more about Munro and her way of thinking, her perceptions, her life course and her way in the world, from her many stories than from these short fact-based accounts of her childhood. And I think that's the way it is with all great writers - their fiction they write is the true window into their souls - not their letters, their memoirs (if they've written any), their biographies (if any have been written about them). From Munro's many stories, we understand so much about her childhood in rural Canada, the years of discovery in Toronto and Vancouver, the breakaway from an unhappy or unfulfilling marriage, the feeling of independence and fear as she tries to establish herself as a writer, the journeys back East by train and the strange encounters along the way, the later years near Lake Huron in towns haunted by ghosts and stories of the past, the life frequently intersecting with the lives of farm girls and working girls - and where they went and what became of the them and how lives in a small town can be on collision courses and people can destroy one another - so much more than what Munro can tell, or has told us, had she tethered her imagination to the facts of her life. That would have been too easy; she's taken the harder, braver course and given us access to her life, and to many others.