The “Foreword” to Alice Munro’s twelfth book is only two pages. Despite its brevity, however, the foreword towers over the five family stories, the six “memoir” stories, and the epilogue. Munro spent maybe a dozen years looking into the history of her father’s Laidlaw family. While many of us, later in life, take a genealogical interest in our ancestors, few of us can know what Munro knows with certainty. She knows what she knows because they were a literate family of writers and published writers. Munro has documentary evidence for the ancestral claims she makes: “Every generation of our family seemed to produce somebody who went in for writing long, outspoken, sometimes outrageous letters, and detailed recollections.”

Despite Munro’s dead pan language, I notice “outspoken” and “outrageous.” And I note one particular sentence with intense personal interest: “Scotland was the country, remember, where John Knox had decided that every child should learn to read and write, in some sort of village school, so that everybody could read the Bible.”

My family is Scottish on both sides, and I note the argumentative bookishness with high interest, not to mention the inclination to outrageousness.

Munro specifically mentions John Knox’s purpose: that everyone should be able to read the Bible. In such a short piece of writing, the word — the Bible — has been important in Munro’s past writing, not in and of itself as far as I can tell, but for what it represents. Munro has, up to this twelfth book, consistently tried to investigate what represents goodness, evil, and the degrees that lie in between. She has also been interested in how the life of the saint and the artist intersect, how the states of determination, intuition, and trance, in particular, affect the saint and the artist both. We will see how this particular “bible” plays out in this set of stories.

She turns herself to the nature of the first five stories:

I put all this material together [the investigations of her Laidlaw ancestors] over the years, and almost without my noticing what was happening, it began to shape itself into something like stories. Some of the characters gave themselves to me in their own words, others rose out of their situations. Their words and my words, a curious recreation of lives, in a given setting that was as truthful as our notion of the past can be.

What Munro has discovered about her ancestors provides the “outline” of the first five stories, but her accounts have “expanded into fiction.”

Of these five stories, I believe the first is a curious and failed experiment that attempts to convey the complex gist of her inheritance. The last of the first five stories is a touching tribute to her father, a very hardworking man who had, in the single-minded pursuit of a dream, found himself hemmed in by happenstance and the worst kind of bad luck. Not only had his fur business been hit by the depression and WWII, but he was also hit with fur-going-out-of-fashion. Beyond this devastation of career and finances, his wife developed early onset Parkinson’s. Munro’s tribute to her father fails somewhat as a story, as lives often do, but it soars as an understanding of the man.

It is the middle three stories of Part One that interest me most: the tales of Andrew, Agnes, Mary, James, and the homesteading brothers. What stands out to me throughout Part One is that while the men have the leisure to write, the women do not. Of the women, only Margaret Laidlaw Hogg ever got into print, and that is because a man (Sir Walter Scott) transcribed her recitations of her family’s tales.

The stories in Part Two “were not memoirs but they were closer to what a memoir does — exploring a life, my own life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way.”

I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could. But the figures around that self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality.

You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on.

Because the stories in Part Two center on herself, they have a through line which the genealogical stories in Part One lack. Of those, four are memorable: “Lying Under the Apple Tree,” “Hired Girl,” “The Ticket,” and “Home,” with the last two forming a magnificent pair that crown the book and give this  reader great pleasure.

As for the family history experiment? There run in any family strengths and talents and wonders. And at the same time, families share common threads of weakness and deviltry. It’s a comfort to know there are other people like yourself, or other people like yourself whom you might strive to be like.

Just how do we bring our ancestral line to life? Genealogy? The essay? Furniture? The story? Tramping the land? Photographs? Paintings? Music? Philosophy?

I guess we each have to seek out the thing that works for us. What works for Alice is fiction. And I would say that the two greatest fictions in this collection are this magnificent pair: “The Ticket” and “Home,” both of which are as much like a regular Alice Munro story as any. In “The Ticket” she looks at how she made her escape from home, and then in “Home” she looks at how her father made his escape from home, without ever having actually left home.

I have the feeling that this entire book was written as much for her daughters and grandchildren as for the rest of us. I have the feeling that each these stories clarifies something about the author.

The ”Foreword” is about writing. It is concise. But it is interesting that the peculiarities of The View from Castle Rock make a foreword necessary at all. “Foreword” reminds me of fair warning. Which seems applicable in this case.