Memoir and Munro

Another way to sort Alice Munro's stories is by narrative point of view, that is, third-person v firstperson. Though her stories all seem somewhat personal, or close to the arc of her life - rarely moving off the template of contemporary stories set in either rural Ontario, Toronto, or Vancouver, often about women struggling through a bad marriage and seeking independence and artistic recognition (I know there are plenty of counter-examples, but this is the large frame that holds most of her stories), there's a real difference in mood between the two narrative styles. It's obvious when we're reading the third-person stories that these are "created," stories, obviously built on Munro's experiences, knowledge, and imagination, but not recounted real events; her first-person stories come about as close as possible, in mood, to memoir - without quite crossing the line. She plays with this distinction in the first few stories in The Moons of Jupiter (I'm reading them in her 1996 Selected Stories) - the two linked pieces about her groups of aunts, a recollection of working in a turkey-gutting business - these feel very much like personal experiences recounted in prose, even if she does change the names of some characters. The story that appears between them in this collection, Dulse, describes a Munro-like woman, a poet who breaks away from a bad relationship and thinks about finding a little privacy and independence in the Maritimes. But she's not Munro - she's a "character." At the end of the paired stories - at the end of the one seemingly about her eccentric aunts on her father's side - Munro recollects visiting the aunts' farm many years later, now the fields are overgrown and  the house remodeled, to search for the grave of a hermit who'd died on the property. She doesn't find it - but does something sharp and surprising and yet so typical of her - ends the story by saying in another time she would have invented a life for the hermit, imagined him in some frustrated relations w/ one of the aunts, etc. - but she's not doing that. This ending about the fiction that could have been but wasn't, oddly makes us think of this story as more true - but in a sly way - maybe Munro is just playing with us and includes this coda to make us more readily believe this story's veracity? This is all now seen in a different light, in the Munro concluded her most recent and perhaps final collection Dear Life with a group of memoir-like stories that she says are the closest thing to memoir she will ever write. So does that change how we think of these earlier first-person seemingly memoir-like stories? It has to.