Lives of Mothers and Daughters:

Growing Up with Alice Munro

Sheila Munro

McClelland and Stewart

272 pages, hardcover

ISBN 0771066694

I have often wondered what it would be like to be in one of Alice Munro’s stories: to experience the truly self-liberating moment the narrator feels in “Boys and Girls” (Dance of the Happy Shades, Ryerson, 1968) as she attempts to release a horse before it is slaughtered, or to suffer the imprint of shame and hurt that is left on the impressionable young Rose In “Royal Beatings” (Who Do You Think You Are? Macmillan, 1968). I have wondered to an even greater extent where Munro gets her ideas and how exactly she manages to capture the essence of characters and instances, making them feel so intensely real. There is a certain mystery shrouding Munro, and only now, after the publication of Sheila Munro’s first book, Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro, are some of the myths dispelled.

“Finally!” was the word that squealed gleefully out of me as I read an excerpt of the memoir in The Globe and Mail weeks before Sheila Munro’s new book was launched. Alice Munro actually asked her daughter to write her biography, and who better than her eldest child to perform the task of recording the most intimate and personal details of an artist reputed as having shied away form the public eye her entire life. I know now why Alice Munro’s lips tightened that evening three years ago at a book signing, when I made the grave mistake of asking her where she lived. She hesitated a moment before bestowing on me a look of chagrin at a question I had never intended to be intrusive.

Sheila Munro’s memoir uncovers the reasons for her mother’s need to be private and live reclusively. The pressures of gender domesticity in the 1950s largely affected Munro’s choice to remain clandestine while establishing her career as a female writer. Her deeply rooted need to write was most crucial to her and since she knew “the creative process [was] so fragile and precarious … she had to protect it at all costs.” When recognition did come in a 1961 article in the Vancouver Sun, the headline ran “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories,” and the undertone of condescension probably added to her craving to keep solitary. “Drawing attention to herself as a writer was the last thing she wanted to do.” In her book, the younger Munro relates her mother’s mishaps those few times she was somewhat candid with her writing: in her [Alice’s] mind, talking about what you were writing was just inviting trouble, and could even sabotage what you were doing.” In the context of knowing how intensely private Munro is, Lives of Mothers and Daughters provides kaleidoscopic insight into the writer and mother.

As the book delves into the secret life of a very private and uncanny lady, it is reassuring that her story is told through the perceptive, wilful eye and intelligible, honest voice of her daughter. This, prized along with Sheila’s craft for storytelling, is an added bonus since particularly personal details are uncovered that may not have been otherwise expressed had someone else written it. For instance, there are segments such as the one in which Alice as a young mother is standing before a mirror while her daughter notices her shapely figure. “I comment on how small her waist is. ‘I have an excellent figure,’ she says, patting powder onto her face with a pink pad, ‘but don’t tell anyone I told you that.’ She puts the pad back inside the round black compact and snaps it shut.” Such tender truths told from this insider’s perspective are sheer delight. Another intriguing tidbit mentioned is the way in which she first met her husband, at the university library, where she volunteered to eat the candy he had accidentally dropped on the floor. Sheila Munro provides plenty of sketches like these, which unveil a fiery, doughty woman.

Although a great deal of the book centres largely on the events of Sheila’s own life, this is not without purpose. It is disheartening, but not entirely unexpected, to learn about Sheila’s struggles with having an idol for a mother. Her conflicts are evident as she wonders “what is there to do with an icon besides worshipping it, or ignoring it, or smashing it to pieces?”

Sheila provides an honest, self-assured account of the trials and tribulations that came with being the daughter of Alice Munro. She also speaks open-heartedly about the instances where she felt she could only bask in the shadows of her mother’s limelight. The residual effects of having a famous writer for a mother pierce through as Sheila second-guesses her own writing abilities. “There seems something ironic about this, my mother taking James [Sheila’s son] for a walk so I can write. Secretly I feel like a fraud. I’m not a real writer.” She also remembers a trying time when she was asked about the kind of writing she did. “I thought he was mocking me because I was Alice Munro’s daughter, and I was stung. I managed to mumble something about ‘Well, nothing really,’ before slinking off to the washroom, hiding in a cubicle and weeping inconsolably.”

What will be surprising to some is the fact that Alice Munro could never be labelled a typical mother. Sheila recounts instances where her mother encouraged her to dye her hair blond, joked with her about experimenting with drugs and, instead of ensuring her daughters had their fill at dinner (as mothers generally do), showed more concern that their minds were well fed with books before all else.

Anyone who has ever read her stories will undoubtedly cast her as something unique; however the words chosen by Munro, herself, as well as her daughter, are perhaps not as flattering. Instead, the words “freak” and “odd” crop up more than once.

Alice Munro admits more than once in the memoir that she considered herself unusual: “Probably people didn’t mock me that much because I was normal looking, but still I was an odd person.” Such subtle confessions makes reading the book all the more tantalizing.

Although, from someone praised by CBC Radio as the “best short story writer in the western world,” one would expect writing that emerges from creative bursts of genius, the reader discovers that Alice Munro writes from a highly biographical standpoint. Since most of the stories contain elements taken from her childhood, from dreams or from reflecting on land that was once raw Ontario landscape, an understanding of the writer’s upbringing, background and history is vital to Lives of Mothers and Daughters. In the memoir, Sheila admits she wishes she had the same upbringing as her mother did because it was the kind of material to draw writing from:

I have the same feeling that my mother’s experience was more vivid, more dramatic, more vivid than mine could ever be, because as a child she was exposed to poverty, to brutality, to illness from which there was no recovery, to a world which was fallen. There was no turning away for her. There was no fence around her yard. For her the only escape was through the imagination.

The autobiographical pieces come together as we begin to recognize parts of Alice from her stories, including her struggles with her own mother who tried desperately to mould the young, defying, smart-mouthed Alice. In fact, Sheila affirms that Munro’s ideas arise form particular experiences or feelings that she successfully extracts from the cavern of her mind, building magnificent pieces of fiction based mostly on memory and truths. While driving with her mother through a small town in Ontario, Sheila recognizes the library that is described in a story and that Alice herself remembers from when she as a 15-year old gazing out the window at horses in the snow.

Sheila manages to capture such intricate details about the people, places and instances in her mother’s life and breathes them onto the pages of the memoir, deliciously preserving them for good. Along with the trivial complexities of daily life in the Munro household, there is also much about Alice’s literary ancestry and of the impact those figures had on her. Sheila relates that her mother’s writing, until she was 23, was consciously imitative and that she aspired to write like Henry James, Ethel Wilson and Virginia Woolf. Munro later identified with writers like Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and James Agee, as their works also dealt with the same the same themes of poverty and eccentricity found in small towns. Lives of Mothers and Daughters reveals that the book that had the greatest impact on Munro’s life is Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. We also learn of the few literary friends Munro did allow into her life, such as Margaret Laurence and Elizabeth Gourlay. The memoir is filled with these sorts of insights that help add flare to familiar fact.

For me, Alice Munro’s fiction is an unfenced playground where the imagination is able to flail arms and legs over an entanglement of colourful, sturdy monkey bars, teeter high above conventional ground and dash down a curving, bending slide before landing keenly on the solid braking ground of real life. If you have read Munro’s fiction before, you will know how powerfully intense her use of character and the value of location can be, and how she has the magical capability of snatching up the reader in the exhilarating and eye-popping thrusts of such rides. Now with this memoir, you too can peer into the framework of that playground. Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro by Sheila Munro deserves to be placed on the shelf among your collection of Alice Munro short stories. And if you have not started it yet—really! Who do you think you are and what in the world are you waiting for? Sheila Munro puts it in a way that sums it up most eloquently: “So unassailable is the truth of her fiction that sometimes I even feel as though I’m living inside an Alice Munro story. It’s as if her view of the world must be the way the world really is, because it feels so convincing, so true, that you trust her every word.”