The ten stories in … Who Do You Think You Are? share the same central character, a woman named Rose. We drop in on her life from early adolescence through middle age. Rose grows up in impoverished circumstances in a small Ontario town; she goes to university and marries a wealthy, appealing, and yet wholly unsuitable young man; she divorces him and, in middle life, achieves a manner of bruised success in her career as an actress and television personality.

It must be acknowledged immediately that the stages of this life are not altogether remarkable or startling. But the plainness of Rose's progress gives no real hint of the exceptional cumulative force of feeling that Munro is able to achieve in these linked stories.

As always with Alice Munro's writing, one wonders whether the precision and immediacy of the detail mean that the stories are autobiographical, more mirror-puzzles like her Lives of Girls and Women (1971) with its warning: "This novel is autobiographical in form but not in fact." Undoubtedly our yearning to attach autobiographical origins to Munro's stories is a tribute to the uncanny authenticity of their texture. She must have lived this or something very much like it, we feel, and by some miracle retained it whole. She has the ability to isolate the one detail that will evoke the rest of the landscape. In this remarkable, immensely pleasurable collection, we are never at a loss for location, be it physical or emotional. Munro's skill in perceiving the exact colouring of a moment never becomes the kind of rarefied, feathery delicacy that can make short stories arch or anaemic. Instead, she achieves a fertile, vigorous robustness: we respond to the fearlessness with which she alternates pain and comedy. Alice Munro has Chekhov's eye—and there is no higher praise—for the way in which we ourselves provide the blade which slits the thin, protective partition between what we think we would like to be and what in fact we are capable of being.

That war within us is explored throughout the collection….

Throughout these stories focused on Rose, Alice Munro also offers brief glimpses of lives lived against the odds. This may indeed be characteristic of writing that centres upon small towns, where the varieties of sensibility and opportunity are more swiftly grasped. In less deft and compassionate hands, this might have seemed merely a gallery of grotesques, but Munro gives these misshapen lives, this world of secondary characters possessing imperfect bodies or minds, a feisty vigour. (p. 62)

Alice Munro's instinct about the way in which we translate ourselves, the routes of fear or vanity or self-deception by which we allow ourselves to be deflected from the road we long ago mapped out, is what gives her writing its urgency and heartbeat. Her stories are the subtlest summonings to reconsider our lives. Their effect reminded me of Gorky's description of Chekhov's presence: "Everyone unwittingly felt an inner longing to be simpler, more truthful, to be more himself." (p. 63)