When truth is stranger than fiction, how should the writer preserve her subtlety? "If I was writing fiction instead of remembering something that happened," Munro writes, in her description of the prostitute from "Voices," "I would never have given her that dress. A kind of advertisement she didn’t need." The prostitute wore "golden-orange taffeta"; Munro the fiction-writer would have had her in olive silk. In another story, the collective failings and misfortunes of her hapless father seem too woeful to be credible: "You would think that this was just too much. The business gone, my mother’s health going. It wouldn’t do in fiction." Even when she is hewing close to personal history, she is conscious of the particular kind of truth required by fiction—perfect pitch and proportion, and perhaps less verisimilitude.

According to Anne Enright, "a kind of absence is essential to Munro's work," the keeping of a distance between writer and reader, so she finds herself grateful for these more personal stories' "insight into Munro's formation as a writer":]]>