Product Description

“So much of what I think I know – and I think I know more about my mother’s life than almost any daughter could know – is refracted through the prism of her writing. Such is the power of her fiction that sometimes it even feels as though I’m living inside an Alice Munro story.”

The millions of people around the world who read Alice Munro’s work are enthralled by her insight into the human heart. Consider, then, what it would be like to have a mother who was so all-knowing. Worse, if that mother were world-famous as you were growing up and trying to make your own way as a writer, while you yourself followed in her footsteps, raising a family and trying to write on the side.

That is Sheila Munro’s dilemma, and it gives this book special fascination for anyone interested in their own relationship with their own mother, or their own daughter.

This book is, in effect, an intimate, affectionate biography of Alice Munro. It describes in a way that only a close relative could, the details of the family background. We follow the family history from the Laidlaws who left Scotland in the early 19th century, to Alice Munro’s birth in 1931, her early years and marriage all the way to the current family, including Alice Munro’s grandchildren. One of the many fascinations of the book is that faithful readers of Alice’s work – and are there any other kind? – will find constant echoes of settings, situations, and characters that occur in her fiction. So this book is not only a fascinating biography of Alice Munro, it also provides an informative commentary to the stories we all know.

But Sheila Munro goes further. As a writer growing up in the shadow of a writing mother, she’s able to write frankly and personally about being a daughter and about being a writer. With the publication of this book – richly embellished with scores of family photographs – Sheila Munro has established herself as a skilled and successful author in her own right.

• Includes dozens of fascinating Munro family snapshots scattered throughout the text
• Full of real-life details that will fascinate any Alice Munro fan

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1407702 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-27
• Released on: 2002-03-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 280 pages

Amazon.ca
In 1997 Alice Munro, one of the most famous and respected fiction writers in the world, approached her daughter, Sheila, about writing her biography. Sheila was in her mid-40s, with two young sons, and struggling to come into her own as a writer. "I was the wrong person to write a biography," she remembers thinking. "I was much too close to her for that. What I wanted to do was to write a memoir about what it was like growing up as her daughter." To Sheila Munro's credit, Lives of Mothers and Daughters is a great deal more than that. Part memoir and part biography of her mother, Lives gives a well-crafted and even-handed account of Alice Munro's ancestry, her childhood in Wingham, Ontario ("inconceivably harsh and full of extremes"), her stormy marriage and divorce, and her career as a writer. Throughout the work, Sheila Munro takes pains to articulate how her mother managed, with varying degrees of success, to negotiate her responsibilities as wife and mother in relation to her writing. The daughter proves particularly skilled at unpacking her mother's fiction, illuminating how real-life events often informed Alice Munro's short stories as well as her novel, Lives of Girls and Women. "I know I am on dangerous ground here," she cautions. "But I can't unravel the truth of my mother's fiction from the reality of what actually happened.... So unassailable is the truth of her fiction that sometimes I even feel that I'm living inside an Alice Munro story."

Although we all read to some extent to learn about life, Sheila Munro, as the child of a writer, must face the dilemma of interpreting her own life refracted through the prism of her mother's work. Lives of Mothers and Daughters takes a compelling look at one of Canada's best-known and most celebrated authors, and Sheila Munro's first book proves as well that she has discovered a voice of her own. --Svenja Soldovieri

From Booklist
Novelist and short-story writer Alice Munro's many readers are certain to find this an intriguing memoir. It is the first book by Munro's daughter, Sheila, now a mother of two children and an aspiring writer living in British Columbia. The book seems in many ways a typical family story, replete with abundant photographs from the family album, images from the 50s through the 90s that would look perfectly comfortable spread out on the coffee table of almost any middle-class North American home. What makes the book extraordinary are the extraordinary accomplishments of the mother under consideration--Alice, a woman who somehow managed to integrate domesticity with a writer's life and who did it, by Sheila's account, with considerable grace and intelligence. Mommie Dearest this is not. Alice Munro's readers will be especially interested in Sheila's descriptions of family events that worked their way into her mother's stories. Trygve Thoreson
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Review
“Sheila Munro establishes herself as…a writer of sophistication and skill. Writing about a literary figure as revered as Alice Munro requires not only integrity but considerable verbal dexterity. Sheila Munro has both.”
–Montreal Gazette

“A perfect mix of biography and personal memoir.”
–Hamilton Spectator

“A restrained and respected entry in the child-of-a-famous-writing-parent genre.…What comes through strongly in Sheila Munro’s account…is Alice’s youthful tenacity and ambition.”
–Catherine Bush, Globe and Mail

“The book is chock-full of lesser bombs, threatening to erupt but gently blanketed in love, understanding and affection.”
–Carla Lucchetta, Vancouver Sun

“While students of Alice Munro will relish the biographical revelations, the other side of the equation – the daughter’s struggle for autonomy – has its own claim to uniqueness…To her credit and her reader’s profit, she is clear-sighted about her predicament.”
–Joan Givner, Toronto Star



From the Hardcover edition.