Having declared she was done with writing, Nobel laureate says she's wavering – and that ideas keep coming
Alice Munro, after announcing her retirement from the writing career which has earned her a Nobel prize this month, has conceded that the ideas keep coming for new stories – and that she is ambivalent about putting a final full stop on her work.
Munro, 82, told the Canada's National Post in definite terms earlier this year that she wanted to retire, saying that she had "very much" come to terms with the decision. However, the revered short-story writer appeared wobble in an interview with the Wall Street Journal following her Nobel win. In it the author, who is suffering from flu, dictated answers to her daughter, Jenny Munro, who forwarded them by email. She said: "Every day I have mixed messages to myself over whether I will retire. I have promised to retire but now and then I get an idea."
Fans hoping for more may take comfort from the fact that she hinted in 2006 that she was poised to give up, telling an interviewer: "I don't know if I have the energy to do this any more", and then continuing much as usual, publishing a new collection, Dear Life, in 2012 to great acclaim.
The author spoke about ageing, saying that her memory has suffered, and that she believed that with the ageing experience came empathy, "because you understand more". Munro's work focuses on the rural communities of southwestern Ontario, "and I find it endlessly interesting, and more new things still come to me about it," she said.
Novelist Philip Roth announced his decision to retire a year ago at the age of 79, in an interview with French magazine Les Inrocks. So far, he has not reversed his decision. "Enough is enough! I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life," he said.
Munro's most recent collection, Dear Life, reached number one in the New York Times paperback trade fiction bestseller list this week, ahead of David Baldacci's The Hit, EL James's Fifty Shades of Grey and The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling.
Asked what she wanted to happen to any unpublished or draft manuscripts after she died, Munro said: "Destroy them."
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