Munro, Sheila 1953-

views updated

MUNRO, Sheila 1953-

PERSONAL: Born 1953, in Canada; daughter of Jim (a bookstore owner) and Alice (an author; maiden name, Laidlaw) Munro; married; children: two sons.

ADDRESSES: Home—Powell River, British Columbia, Canada. Agent—c/o Author Mail, McClelland & Stewart, 481 University Ave., Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5G 2E9.

CAREER: Writer.

WRITINGS:

(With Cheryl-Lynn Aman) Open Doors: A GenderEquity Instruction Kit, Powell River Women's Network (Powell River, British Columbia, Canada), 1993.

Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing up with Alice Munro, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: Sheila Munro, eldest daughter of writer Alice Munro, was asked by her mother to write her biography. She instead chose to write a memoir and titled it Lives of Mothers and Daughters, a play on the title of her mother's coming-of-age novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Grandmother Alice often helped by watching Sheila's children so that she could concentrate on the book.

Munro writes of her mother's life as a young woman. Alice Munro was born to a poor family in an Ontario farming community and lost her own mother to Parkinson's disease when Alice was a teen. She attended the University of Western Ontario on a scholarship, married Jim Munro while she was a sophomore, and bore Sheila when she was twenty-one. As was the custom in the 1950s, she married young and had her children while still in her twenties. She baked pies, taught her children their manners, and performed all the other tasks of mothering and housekeeping. But even as she did laundry, in her mind Alice was writing. When she closeted herself in the corner of her bedroom where she kept her typewriter, her husband and children respected that need. He often took the children on excursions so that Alice could work in a quiet house. She did this for nearly twenty years, all the time contributing to literary magazines, before her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, was published in 1968. The Munros divorced during the 1970s, and Alice remarried, this time to an old friend.

Munro notes in the book that when she became a teenager she and her mother became "more like girlfriends than like mother and daughter." They shared the same fashion sense and shopped at the same stores. "She listened to my Beatles records and we discussed whether 'Nowhere Man' was God," wrote Munro. "She fed books to me the way other mothers fed food, as essential nourishment. I was proud that she recommended that I read Lolita at the age that Lolita is in the novel, thirteen. . . . I devoured the novels my mother passed along to me, among them Doctor Zhivago and War and Peace and nonfiction titles such as The Feminine Mystique and The Second Sex."

As Munro completed her education, her mother's fame followed her. The relationship was noted not only by her peers, but by her professors, making life very difficult. But mother and daughter remained close, and they saw each other as much as possible, often meeting for drinks or dinner.

"Yet, there was something a little shameful about it," writes Munro, "as if for her I wanted to be the perfect audience and the ideal friend, the one who stayed behind and waited like a proud parent while she went out into the front lines to book signings, interviews, and awards ceremonies and came back to tell me all about it. . . . It wasn't my relationship with her that was the problem. It was my relationship to her. . . . It was as if she had all the talent, the vivacity, the humour, all the words, while I had . . . nothing at all."

The memoir provides other glimpses into the lives Alice and Sheila. Quill & Quire's Keith Garebian wrote that "much of the text is given over to connecting these moments and more elaborate biographical threads to episodes in Alice's fiction."

In Slow Dog online, Meleah Maynard noted that Munro "saves the rush of feelings of jealousy and inadequacy until the last few pages of the book." Here Munro writes of her mother: "She is the gold standard by which everything else is measured, to whom everyone else is compared, and I can understand why. I do not disagree. It's just that it makes her into an icon, and I don't suppose anyone wants their mother, or their father for that matter, to become an icon. What is there to do with an icon besides worshipping it, or ignoring it, or smashing it to pieces?" Maynard said that "by writing this book, Sheila Munro has answered that question for herself: she's trying to live with an icon the best way she can. Alice Munro fans will have a hard time putting this memoir down."

"Sheila Munro's observations are often sharp and astute," commented Maureen Garvie in Books in Canada, "yet they are also generous and carefully nonjudgmental. . . .And while Sheila recalls a certain distance from her mother in the early years when she and her sister Jenny were growing up, she also recognizes that the child-rearing standards of those times differed markedly from the empathetic model of today. By the late Sixties, the mother-daughter relationship had shifted to greater closeness, with Alice later wondering whether she wasn't too much of a pal and not enough a parent."

Kathryn Harrison wrote in the New York Times Books Review that "art is a process of revelation, of making the self naked, and the children of artists are forced, if they read or look, to see their parents' nakedness. . . . Reading her mother's work, Sheila sees a woman—her mother?—who is hungry, sexual, human: both smaller and larger than the iconic Mother, necessarily lost. 'Want to love you, want to love you!' Sheila Munro would cry to Alice, when, as a little girl, she expected a punishment. Her cry echoes through this book, the cry of every child who sees too much—too little?—of the mother she desires."