Two decades ago, when I asked the editor of The New York Times Magazine whether he would be interested in a profile of the Canadian writer Alice Munro, his answer was that she wasn’t a “sexy” enough figure, adding that another writer had previously attempted a piece that didn’t work out. I argued that Munro, although not a household name, was probably among the best—if not the best—contemporary short-story writers and deserving of a profile. She had been compared to no less than Chekhov (Cynthia Ozick), Tolstoy (John Updike), and Flaubert (Claire Messud). (Her Nobel Prize in Literature would come in 2013.)
I had admired Munro’s stories from the beginning, the dazzling plainspoken prose that dipped into lyric moments, attesting to underground passions, unarticulated longings, and unspoken regrets—or “open secrets,” as the title of one of her collections has it. She seemed to know her female characters from the inside out, bringing out the clandestine layers of feeling that accompanied them while they went about their prosaic lives, polishing doorknobs or mopping the floors—lives which she once described in her only novel, Lives of Girls and Women, as “dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”
