Customer Reviews

Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro

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Sheila Munro brings to this work the same exquisite insight and compassion that marks her mother's novelistic treatment of character. It would have been no small burden as a writer to have lived in her mother's shadow and Sheila Munro explores this with honesty and good humour and without self-pity. In tackling this theme in her first major work, however, she has set herself up for further comparison with the incomparable Alice. I bought this book seeking, somewhat voyeuristically, after Alice Munro, and skipped over the passages in which Sheila focuses on her own life and loves. The book is , essentially, about Sheila's experience of living with an artistic and lauded mother, and because of this focus, she is able to neatly sidestep any potential breaches of Alice Munro's privacy. (But of course, the hope of such breaches underpinned my purchase so I was a little disappointed!) It is, nevertheless, a mature and thoughtful treatment of this theme. The quality of the writing is uneven and the overall structure lacking enough coherence for my taste but there are moments of startling human insight that bode well for Sheila's future writing endeavours - as long as she can break away from explicit depictions of her own history. A pseudonym might also help.

"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant." It's significant that Sheila Munro chose to open her memoir with this poem by Emily Dickinson, because this is exactly what she offers us--a distinctively honest and unique perspective on the great short story writer, Alice Munro. An exhaustive official biography this is not, nor does it supersede Alice Munro's own largely autobiographical stories as a way to connect with her magical literary sensibility. However, it does give us fascinating insights into what it is like to be intimate with the famous writer as a daughter and friend. Sheila Munro is a fine writer in her own right and she takes risks in style and organization--I happened to enjoy this and found it made for an enjoyable, thought-provoking read. The family photographs alone are worth the price, but it was equally inspiring to learn about Alice Munro's human side: her bouts with writer's block, her struggle with the "double life" of motherhood and writing, her charming reticence about her many awards. As an aspiring writer myself, I realized all women writers are daughters of Alice Munro in a way. We work in her shadow, but like Sheila Munro, we can also use her example to create valuable works of our own. A must for Alice Munro fans and aspiring writers.

If you like the works of Alice Munro this memoir by her daughter helps you to understand her writing even better