The Canadian writer, 81, has hinted at retirement before, but fans will be hoping this isn't the end of her glittering career
Sad news, for fans of Alice Munro, the short-story author whom Margaret Atwood once described as en route to "international literary sainthood", and whose writing Jane Smiley, awarding her the Man Booker international prize, said was "practically perfect". She has told Canadian press that she's retiring – and this time she sounds definite.
Winning the Trillium book award for Dear Life, Munro told the National Post that the prize was "a little more special in that I'm probably not going to write any more. And, so, it's nice to go out with a bang," adding that this was definitely it for her, and she has "very much" come to terms with the decision.
"I'm delighted. Not that I didn't love writing, but I think you do get to a stage where you sort of think about your life in a different way. And perhaps, when you're my age, you don't wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be. It's like, at the wrong end of life, sort of becoming very sociable," she said.
Asked, mournfully, by the Post if she might reconsider her decision, given the number of people who will be disappointed to hear of her retirement, Munro declined. "Well, tell them to go read the old ones over again. There's lots of them," she said.
I'm pinning my hopes on the fact that this is something Munro has hinted at before – in 2006 telling the Globe and Mail: "I don't know if I have the energy to do this any more." Since then, she has found the energy to write an enormous amount.
In 1994, she told the Paris Review: "It's not the giving up of the writing that I fear. It's the giving up of this excitement or whatever it is that you feel that makes you write. This is what I wonder: what do most people do once the necessity of working all the time is removed? Even the retired people who take courses and have hobbies are looking for something to fill this void, and I feel such horror of being like that and having that kind of life. The only thing that I've ever had to fill my life has been writing. So I haven't learned how to live a life with a lot of diversity. The only other life I can imagine is a scholarly life, which I probably idealise."
But Munro is now 81, and told the New Yorker last year she's "losing names or words in a commonplace way", and that "this time, I think it's for real". Philip Roth, at 80, has certainly stuck to his promise that "I'm done … Enough is enough! I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life."
Not that there's a correct age to stop. Ruth Rendell, 83, was horrified at the suggestion she might ever put down her pen, saying earlier this year: "It's absolutely essential to my life. I don't know what I would do if I didn't write. I have to. One fears one might have a stroke or something, and then perhaps I couldn't write, but that is something to be terrified of, to dread." Having read her latest novel, The Child's Child, written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, I hope the day of Rendell's retirement is far, far away.
And I'm going to keep crossing my fingers that Munro might still change her mind.
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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