That Alice Munro titled her last volume of short stories Dear Life could not have been a surprise to her devoted readers. In even the most merciless stories in the 14 volumes she has published since 1968, she has seemed steadily to embrace the energy of life itself. Fear and pain exist, but there is always something beyond the worst events – if not redemption or better times, then at least understanding or the outline of meaning. To me, this seems to be the quest of a writer who is above all curious, above all an investigator.

Munro once said of her ambitions: "What I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together – radiant, everlasting." When we read her work, we must be awed by that precision, by the way that her intent focus on the particular ends up illuminating the general. Munro is the only author whose writings are so vivid to me that I have occasionally mistaken incidents in her stories for memories of my own past.

Now Munro is bowing out. She is 82, her husband died in April; she is looking forward to doing something more sociable and less taxing than writing. Of course, I do not want to lose my access, as a reader, to her gaze upon the world, but I think it is a wise and telling choice. For one thing, she has, in the last four stories of Dear Life, revisited early material, rethought it in the wiser and more accepting terms that we would expect of someone who has spent most of her adult life maturing in the public eye. She has also recognised, perhaps, that every career has a natural arc and a natural end.

Not many successful writers have lived into their 80s – the perennially mature Henry James was 72 when he died, Tolstoy 71 when he published his last novel. Edith Wharton was working on her last novel when she died at 75. The View from Castle Rock, which Munro published when she was 75, was a grand and intriguing departure, both geographically and thematically, and one of my favourites.

But now we must let her off the hook. Thank you, Alice Munro, for one glittering jewel of a story after another. Thank you for the many days and nights I spent lost in your work. Thank you for your unembarrassed woman's perspective on the lives of girls and women, but also the lives of boys and men. Thank you for your cruelty as well as your kindness, because the one plus the other is the essence of truthfulness.