How does Alice Munro do it? She’s told us how: “I sit in a corner of the chesterfield and stare at the wall, and I keep getting it and getting it, and when I’ve got enough in my mind, I start to write.” And then, of course, “I don’t really have it at all.”

The long journey from the chesterfield to finally “having it” is the focus of Robert Thacker’s ambitious account of the writer’s life. The emphasis here is squarely on “writer”: those looking for the lowdown on Canada’s pre-eminent writer of fiction will have to sift through many pages to come to a personal nugget.

Thacker is a non-invasive – and authorized – biographer, revealing little more of Munro’s life than we already know. Her daughter Sheila, in her 2001 memoir Lives of Mothers and Daughters, offered a much more flesh-and-blood reflection of Munro as a young woman, wife, and mother. Respectful of his limits in not being “family,” Thacker is circumspect about people who might be disturbed by being objects of scrutiny. Munro’s ex-husband (Munro’s Books owner James Munro), her daughters, and her stepmother are hardly more than flickering shadows.

What Thacker does provide is an extraordinary wealth of detail on Munro’s progress as a writer. Here, as an academic (he did his graduate work on Munro and now teaches CanLit at St. Lawrence University in upper New York state) he clearly feels on solid ground. He collates the critical response to each Munro book from Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) to last year’s Runaway. In so doing, he brings together much illuminating commentary on what Munro does and how she does it.

As Munro’s reputation grows, the trickle of reviews becomes a flood, and this deluge tends to slow the book’s pace. Thacker must also juggle the competing chronologies of Munro’s life and her stories. But he can be repetitive, telling us three times that the text Munro wrote for a never-published book of photographs was not wasted but thriftily recycled in stories. He assures us several times that her brief “romantic” liaison with John Metcalf was less important than their literary relationship. And we hear any number of times that she and her current partner, Gerald Fremlin, enjoy cross-country skiing.

That said, the book is surprisingly absorbing. Who would think the details of publishing could be so compelling? Thacker makes a cliff-hanger out of the story of the Canadian/U.S. versions of a group of Munro stories that appeared in 1978 in Canada as the collection Who Do You Think You Are? and in 1979 in the U.S. as the “novel” The Beggar Maid. Munro literally stopped the Canadian presses as the book was half-set, changing the material she wanted to include and the order in which she wanted it to appear. It’s astonishing to hear of her switching stories back and forth between first and third person narration at the eleventh hour.

Thacker conscientiously addresses the place of Huron County and the town of Wingham in Munro’s writing. But where he pulls out the stops is on the role that others have played in shaping her work: her first editor, Audrey Coffin, eventually succeeded by Doug Gibson; and her smart, dedicated agent, Virginia Barber. We get the inside story on Munro’s long relationship with The New Yorker, crucially important in establishing her as a writer of international stature.

Thacker gives us a woman who achieves what she does by constantly fighting the distractions of the world and the very human desire to please. This is a woman so modest – or shy – that she refused the appointment of Officer of the Order of Canada. Yet in the accolades Thacker compiles, she is compared favourably to writers from Thomas Hardy and James Joyce to Willa Cather. She is “our Chekhov, our Flaubert.”

The book is far from hagiography; Thacker is scrupulous in providing balance in critics who ponder whether she can fail, and find that she can. But in the end, for Thacker and for legions of her readers, Munro is simply dazzling, a natural wonder.