| Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing up with Alice Munro |  | Author: Sheila Munro
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy Used: $7.58
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 2188127
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 280
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 6.1 x 1
ISBN: 0771066694
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780771066696
ASIN: 0771066694
Publication Date: April 24, 2001
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Condition: Cover wear and may contain some marks or writing. Keen Northwest ships in 2 business days or less. Refunds for any reason if item returned within 30 days of shipment.
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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
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| Customer Reviews:
 A Must for Alice Munro Fans and Aspiring Writers November 12, 2008
"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.
 insight and kindness March 8, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
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