Away from Her

Acclaim for Alice Munro
    “No one working today can write more convincingly about ‘the progress of love’ than Alice Munro.”
    —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
    “Alice Munro is the living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years. … Her genius, like Chekhov’s, is quiet and particularly hard to describe, because it has the simplicity of the best naturalism, in that it seems not translated from life, but, rather, like life itself.”
    —Mona Simpson, The New Republic
    “Munro’s stories are composed with a clarity and economy that make novel-writing look downright superfluous and self-indulgent.”
    —A. O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review
    “[Munro’s] writing never loses its juice, never goes brittle; it also never equivocates or blinks, but simply lets observations speak for themselves.”
    —Lorrie Moore, The Atlantic Monthly
    “Alice Munro spins tales that show us, again and again, and with wondrous grace, how much can be done in a simple short story.”
    —Pico Iyer, Time
    “It has been remarked that there is almost always something open-ended, unexplained, or incomplete in Munro’s work. But this deliberate refusal to weave in all the loose threads makes her stories seem more authentic, since this is what real life is like.”
    —Alison Lurie, The New York Review of Books
    “Munro is the illusionist whose trick can never be exposed. And that is because there is no smoke, there are no mirrors. Munro really does know magic: how to summon the spirits and the emotions that animate our lives.”
    —The Washington Post
    “In Munro’s hands, a short story is more than big enough to hold the world—and to astonish us, again and again, with the choices forced upon the human heart.”
    —
Chicago Tribune
    “Nothing in a Munro story ever feels contrived. … [She] sings, and her women are heroic. They endure the lives produced by their choices and the fates, and they endure in the mind of the reader.”
    —
The Boston Globe
    “From a markedly finite number of essential components, Munro rather miraculously spins out countless permuta tions of desire and despair, attenuated hopes and cloud bursts of epiphany.”
    —
The Village Voice

Away from Her
    Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published more than ten collections of stories as well as a novel,
Lives of Girls and Women.
During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and its Giller Prize, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in
The New Yorker
,
The Atlantic Monthly
,
The Paris Review
, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.

ALSO BY ALICE MUNRO
    The View From Castle Rock
    Runaway
    Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
    The Love of a Good Woman
    Selected Stories
    Open Secrets
    Friend of My Youth
    The Progress of Love
    The Moons of Jupiter
    The Beggar Maid
    Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You
    Lives of Girls and Women
    Dance of the Happy Shades

Preface
    Every now and then, a piece of writing enters your life and collects seemingly unrelated threads, tangling some of them together, straightening out a few, until an articulate pattern is embroidered. One you could have never made yourself.
    “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” entered my life when I was twenty-one years old. It crept right into me, had its way with me, and shifted my direction in ways I didn’t understand until years later. I am not an academic, nor a writer (I don’t consider the adaptation of other people’s stories serious writing), so I feel ill equipped to complete the task ofwriting this preface other than from a purely personal point of view. I believe I can say, without danger of overstatement, that I have had a relationship with this story that has been as powerful and as transformative as any I have had with another human being.
    I first read the story on a plane on my way home from Iceland, where I had just finished acting in a film with Julie Christie. My grandmother was gradually losing her grip on her independence and on her memory. My romantic life was in