This side of the truth

In the Foreword she writes to her new book Alice Munro, Canada’s best known and most admired short story writer, states that some 10 or 12 years ago she began to study the history of her family and envisaged a memoir, unlike the fictions which have engaged her all her working life. She was thorough in her researches and unearthed a great deal of material, almost all of it in the Selkirk and Galashiels public libraries. She even spent some months in Scotland, where the Laidlaw branch of her family had its roots. She then attacked the subject but discovered that she was not merely the legatee of her own family but Alice Munro, writer of fiction, whose stories exist in their own right and appear to owe nothing to her ancestry.

In other words in trying to write fact she found that she was writing fiction; each imaginative excursion had its origins in some authentic family detail, and the result is a hybrid of the two genres.