NEW YORK — Alice Munro, one of the world's most highly praised authors, once wrote a story called An Ounce of Cure, in which a young woman endures a disastrous romance and finds herself fascinated rather than traumatized.

"I felt that I had had a glimpse of the shameless, marvellous, shattering absurdity with which the plots of life, though not of fiction, are improvised," the woman decides. Over the past 35 years, few writers have proved as capable at making room for real life within the confines of traditional storytelling. Often compared to Anton Chekhov, Munro has attained near-canonical status as a thorough but forgiving documenter of the human spirit.

The 71-year-old Munro is increasingly in favour with readers. Her most recent publication, a paperback edition of her story collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, has more than 160,000 copies in print, a big number for short stories and bigger still for a literary Canadian who rarely talks to the media.

"She's become a virtuoso, really," says John Updike. "She manages to get into people's skin, without seeming to dive in, without being ostentatious."

On a recent sunny morning, Munro is interviewed in the lounge of a midtown Manhattan hotel. Those expecting the dreamy melancholy of a reclusive writer will be disappointed - or pleasantly surprised. Munro has a bright smile, a healthy complexion and an open manner suggesting less an anguished artist than a friendly neighbour.

"I think people are often disappointed when they meet me; they expect an elevated atmosphere," she says.

"I remember once, long ago, I was introduced to a woman who had read my stuff, and there were two of three other women there and we were all talking about dyeing our hair. And later on this woman told me she was shocked because writers weren't supposed to have these trivial vanities and occupations."

Her published work, which includes nine story collections and one novel, often turns on the difference between Munro's childhood in Wingham, Ont., a conservative town west of Toronto, and her adult life after the social revolution of the 1960s.

"It was wonderful," Munro says of the '60s. "Because, having been born in 1931, I was a little old, but not too old, and women like me after a couple of years were wearing miniskirts and prancing around."

Munro's writing has brought her numerous awards. She won a National Book Critics Circle prize for Hateship, Friendship and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's award, one of Canada's highest literary honours.

Out of modesty, and self-preservation, Munro doesn't accept the high opinion of others, likening her reputation to a beautiful costume with flaws in the stitching. She says she feels intimidated by the presence of other writers, and cites the late William Maxwell, an author and longtime New Yorker editor whom she met several years ago at a party.

"I literally couldn't speak, I was so awed, and this was made more so by the fact he was very modest and charming," she says. "He saw the trouble I was in and sort of gently held the conversation up until I could manage."

Pride, however deserved, would only waste energy better spent on the work at hand. Munro can chat away about dyeing her hair and other such matters, but she acknowledges that stories are ever "nagging at the back of my mind." She writes every day - in longhand, early in the morning, after coffee and before the phone starts ringing.

"If I'm going to get anything done that day, I sort of have to do it by 9 o'clock, when the world isn't coming in on me," she says.

"And we live in a small town (Clinton, Ont.). I go get the mail and I have a 92-year-old cousin who lives up the street and I get her mail and I go in to visit her. I do things that aren't particularly burdensome, but if I try to write after that I won't be able to get into the story."

Munro, a fox farmer's daughter, was a literary person in a nonliterary town, concealing her ambition like a forbidden passion. "It was glory I was after . . . walking the streets like an exile or a spy," recalls the narrator of Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, a novel published in 1971.

She received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism as a "cover-up" for her pursuit of literature. She was still an undergraduate when she sold a story to CBC Radio.

Although determined to be different, Munro for years lived liked millions of other women. She dropped out of college to marry a fellow student, James Munro, had three children and became a full-time housewife. By her early 30s, she was so frightened and depressed she could barely write a full sentence.

Her good fortune was to open a bookstore with her husband in 1963. Stimulated by everything from the conversation of adults to simply filling out invoices, her narrative talents resurfaced but her marriage collapsed. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, came out in 1968 and won the Governor General's prize.

"When the book first came they sent me a half dozen copies. I put them in the closet. I didn't look at them. I didn't tell my husband they had come, because I couldn't bear it. I was afraid it was terrible," says Munro, who is now married to Gerald Fremlin, a geographer.

"And one night, he was away, and I forced myself to sit down and read it all the way through, and I didn't think it was too bad. And I felt I could acknowledge it and it would be OK."

The brief, sporadic free time of parenthood trained Munro to concentrate on short stories. But even with her children all grown, she chooses the same format, deciding she lacked what another great story writer, V.S. Pritchett, once called the "novelist's vegetative temperament."

"I knew that I lacked something, because even when my life changed so I had enough time, I couldn't seem to write a novel," she says. "I try to write novels, but they go so flabby and I don't have any good sense of what I'm doing."

Munro's ideas rarely come from history books or from current events, but instead from memories, anecdotes, gossip. The stories themselves are almost literally timeless, with few topical references or famous names.

"I don't do a lot of indicators where you can tell what time it is, because that would impinge on me too much. Somebody writing about now would have to have Iraq in it. They need to have the right music and right celebrities and right style of clothes," she says.

"In ordinary life I am a fairly active, political person. I have opinions and join clubs. But I always want to see what happens with people underneath; it interests me more."