Alice Munroe: deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum

People's lives, in [my home town] as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.
- Alice Munroe

Today is the birthday of short-story writer Alice Munro, born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario (1931). She's the author of many collections of short stories, including Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), The Moons of Jupiter (1982), and Open Secrets (1994). She studied journalism on scholarship at the University of Western Ontario and then struggled to support herself as a writer, but she finally gave up and became a housewife in the 1950s. She had four children, and stayed home to take care of them, but while they were napping, she began to read widely - many of the most important books of the 20th century. And she began to write, though she found it very difficult. She said: "I went through about a year ... when I couldn't finish a sentence. It was a time of terrible depression, about what I could do measured against what I wanted to do." Then, in 1959, her mother died, and Munro suddenly found that she was able to explore her personal life in her fiction in ways she'd never been able to do before. Nine years later she published her first book of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968).

Munro often writes about ordinary people in small-town Ontario, where she grew up.

Munro's most recent collection of stories is Dear Life (2012).