This story began as a fairy tale.
I was nineteen, an aspiring writer myself, when I first read the fiction of Alice Munro. Fresh out of an MFA program in my mid-twenties, I moved to Victoria and stumbled upon a job at a bookstore co-founded by my literary idol. For the next nine years, as head of social media at Munro’s Books, I proudly advertised this connection (“Yes, that Alice,” the shop’s website boasted), happy to fill in the blanks of our icon’s elusive public persona with a fantasy of motherly sacrifice—for her bookselling days had coincided with the parenting of her young daughters, a time that predates the current Government Street location. Munro herself never worked in that building, a neoclassical marvel with lofty ceilings and a loftier origin story.
