Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro

Beverly Rasporich is a professor in the Faculty of Communication and
Culture at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro.

Sheila Munro’s memoir, which is structured around the life of her
famous mother, is a highly readable book, replete with interesting
family photographs that are visually presented as if in a snapshot
album. It also includes references to Alice Munro’s fiction as
possible autobiographical material. While the memoir adds to a
sympathetic expression of family dynamics, it also projects a
disquieting undercurrent: that of a woman struggling to find her own
voice and person—not unlike many of the heroines of Munro’s fiction.
Sheila Munro is a good writer; indeed, the tone of her prose often
echoes that of her mother’s, particularly in her descriptions of the
natural world. If Alice’s brilliant art overshadows, Sheila manages to
tell her story without envy or malice, never writing disparagingly of
either of her parents, although she does suggest tensions that she never
fully explains. She mentions, for example, about having harbored
hostility toward her father. She infers, too, that while becoming an
adolescent, she had a sisterlike relationship with Alice—perhaps even
a competitive one—but she does not explore this further.

This memoir is at its most instructive as a female genre and as family
genealogy. Like Margaret Laurence who wrote an autobiography that
included significant women in her life, Sheila Munro broadens her story
through a generational history that includes Laidlaw pioneers, Anne
Laidlaw, and an authorial lineage of relatives that begat Alice Munro.
Not only is this typical of women who are prone to write about
themselves in community, but Sheila mimics Alice’s own fictional
interest in generations. Ultimately, Sheila Munro seems accepting of her
own second place as a writing woman in relation to her mother. She does
this with what appears to be a family faith in an inclusive literary
tradition for all of its members. In this sense, the daughter has
successfully discovered her literary self. She has engagingly recorded
the lives and characters of her own ancestors while adding a chapter of
unique perspective to the life of Alice Munro.