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''A photograph is a secret about a secret,'' Diane Arbus famously said. ''The more it tells you, the less you know.''
Readers of Sheila Munro's ''Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro'' might be tempted to adjust that observation so it applies to narrative. The more Sheila Munro reads -- and reads into -- her mother's short stories and interviews, and the more of her family's history she discovers and shares, the less we know of what must necessarily remain mysterious: the relationship of a writer to her subject, and how her artistic focus might sometimes align with, sometimes diverge from -- or even eclipse -- the work of raising three daughters.
In a hybrid work of biography, memoir and literary criticism (whose title alludes to Alice Munro's coming-of-age novel, ''Lives of Girls and Women''), Sheila Munro examines the writing life and bears witness to what her mother's readers have always assumed: that her fiction is autobiographical, that her brand of realism, at once affectionate and clinical, owes a debt to . . . reality.
''Lives of Mothers & Daughters'' opens with the engagement of Alice Laidlaw and Jim Munro. Sheila Munro's parents met in 1950 in college, where Alice -- like Rose in the story ''The Beggar Maid'' -- was a scholarship student. Sheila follows her mother's life and career from this point until 1963, when Sheila herself was 10. Then she jumps back in time to examine her mother's parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, as well as Alice Munro's early life.
If the book doesn't make strict chronological sense, it does obey emotional logic. Sheila Munro begins -- as children tend to begin accounts of their parents' lives -- with the meeting that ultimately produced her, and then, as a kind of intermission between Sheila's earlier, presexual and preconscious life and her subsequent adolescent awakenings, inserts her mother's artistic formation, which both prefigures and inhibits her own. The device that allows the jumps backward is travel: Sheila's journeys to the Ontario towns where Alice Munro and her forebears lived. Sheila's burden, it emerges, is to find perspective, a way of seeing emotional landscapes that her mother has mastered: ''As an artist she cultivated a huge detachment; she was looking at everything from a distance . . . trying to get a larger vision.''
The Alice Munro revealed by her eldest daughter was determined and diligent. But it wasn't until 1968, nearly 20 years after her debut in Folio (the University of Western Ontario's literary magazine), that her first collection of stories, ''Dance of the Happy Shades,'' was published. In between were years of apprenticeship, of learning her craft by working around and among the many obligations of a housewife and mother, a double life that Sheila judges useful, since ''the predictable routines of household tasks'' gave her mother ''respite from the immensity of the real work, allowing for a shallower, more ordinary state of mind.'' Indeed, at this very moment, dirty floors and laundry are rescuing countless women writers from what Alice Munro has described as a ''series of impossible leaps'' -- writing.
What saves ''Lives of Mothers & Daughters'' from being of interest only to those familiar with Alice Munro's body of work are the questions it asks about being the child of an artist, a child who is seen through art, used by art. ''I can't unravel the truth of my mother's fiction from the reality of what actually happened,'' Sheila observes of her own childhood. It's a judgment, but a gentle, even hesitant, one. As a writer with two young sons, Sheila understands that she is inherently complicit: to admit she suffered as the child of a writer is to confess that she might subject her own children to the same exploitation. But that would depend on her being sufficiently ruthless.
''When I first read the story,'' Sheila writes of ''Miles City, Montana,'' ''I marveled at my mother's ability to capture my character. . . . How could she know I was like that, 'too eager to be what we in fact depended on her to be,' and so terribly sensitive to criticism, and how could she not want to change that?'' The question is of vocation. To be fair, had Alice Munro felt what she apparently did not -- a call to adjust the nature of her child -- she might have proved a destructive mother, no matter how honorable her motive. Perhaps writing, absorbing Alice as it did, offered her daughters a protection, a gift. They were not her work, so they were freed from her manipulation. The problem for Sheila is the idea that her development might be watched and recorded for a purpose unrelated to her welfare: used by the voracious and amoral writer who exists in the same person as her mother.
''I always talked back. I wasn't a nice child,'' Alice Munro tells her daughter. ''Being nice meant such a terrible abdication of self.'' ''I don't want her to say this,'' Sheila admits, afraid of what it might mean, especially in contrast to herself, a daughter who is ''compliant, eager to please, good.'' ''I was nice. . . . Did I abdicate my self?'' she worries. Is Sheila, a writer struggling under the long shadow of her mother, lacking that essential selfish self, the artistic self who insists on her own needs before any other's? This anxious question is the subtext of her book.
''She has spoken often of her art for dissembling, for concealment, which, for a writer, can be very advantageous, allowing her to remain free and detached, almost without a self,'' Sheila reports of her mother. Writing, Alice Munro has suggested, was a means of ''leapfrogging'' over the issue of self, presumably creating elaborate fictional counterparts as a means of camouflage. But perhaps this is disingenuous, an instance of the admitted dissembling?
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. As with other taboos, breaking this one exacts a price. 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.
by Kathryn Harrison
Readers of Sheila Munro's ''Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro'' might be tempted to adjust that observation so it applies to narrative. The more Sheila Munro reads -- and reads into -- her mother's short stories and interviews, and the more of her family's history she discovers and shares, the less we know of what must necessarily remain mysterious: the relationship of a writer to her subject, and how her artistic focus might sometimes align with, sometimes diverge from -- or even eclipse -- the work of raising three daughters.
In a hybrid work of biography, memoir and literary criticism (whose title alludes to Alice Munro's coming-of-age novel, ''Lives of Girls and Women''), Sheila Munro examines the writing life and bears witness to what her mother's readers have always assumed: that her fiction is autobiographical, that her brand of realism, at once affectionate and clinical, owes a debt to . . . reality.
''Lives of Mothers & Daughters'' opens with the engagement of Alice Laidlaw and Jim Munro. Sheila Munro's parents met in 1950 in college, where Alice -- like Rose in the story ''The Beggar Maid'' -- was a scholarship student. Sheila follows her mother's life and career from this point until 1963, when Sheila herself was 10. Then she jumps back in time to examine her mother's parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, as well as Alice Munro's early life.
If the book doesn't make strict chronological sense, it does obey emotional logic. Sheila Munro begins -- as children tend to begin accounts of their parents' lives -- with the meeting that ultimately produced her, and then, as a kind of intermission between Sheila's earlier, presexual and preconscious life and her subsequent adolescent awakenings, inserts her mother's artistic formation, which both prefigures and inhibits her own. The device that allows the jumps backward is travel: Sheila's journeys to the Ontario towns where Alice Munro and her forebears lived. Sheila's burden, it emerges, is to find perspective, a way of seeing emotional landscapes that her mother has mastered: ''As an artist she cultivated a huge detachment; she was looking at everything from a distance . . . trying to get a larger vision.''
The Alice Munro revealed by her eldest daughter was determined and diligent. But it wasn't until 1968, nearly 20 years after her debut in Folio (the University of Western Ontario's literary magazine), that her first collection of stories, ''Dance of the Happy Shades,'' was published. In between were years of apprenticeship, of learning her craft by working around and among the many obligations of a housewife and mother, a double life that Sheila judges useful, since ''the predictable routines of household tasks'' gave her mother ''respite from the immensity of the real work, allowing for a shallower, more ordinary state of mind.'' Indeed, at this very moment, dirty floors and laundry are rescuing countless women writers from what Alice Munro has described as a ''series of impossible leaps'' -- writing.
What saves ''Lives of Mothers & Daughters'' from being of interest only to those familiar with Alice Munro's body of work are the questions it asks about being the child of an artist, a child who is seen through art, used by art. ''I can't unravel the truth of my mother's fiction from the reality of what actually happened,'' Sheila observes of her own childhood. It's a judgment, but a gentle, even hesitant, one. As a writer with two young sons, Sheila understands that she is inherently complicit: to admit she suffered as the child of a writer is to confess that she might subject her own children to the same exploitation. But that would depend on her being sufficiently ruthless.
''When I first read the story,'' Sheila writes of ''Miles City, Montana,'' ''I marveled at my mother's ability to capture my character. . . . How could she know I was like that, 'too eager to be what we in fact depended on her to be,' and so terribly sensitive to criticism, and how could she not want to change that?'' The question is of vocation. To be fair, had Alice Munro felt what she apparently did not -- a call to adjust the nature of her child -- she might have proved a destructive mother, no matter how honorable her motive. Perhaps writing, absorbing Alice as it did, offered her daughters a protection, a gift. They were not her work, so they were freed from her manipulation. The problem for Sheila is the idea that her development might be watched and recorded for a purpose unrelated to her welfare: used by the voracious and amoral writer who exists in the same person as her mother.
''I always talked back. I wasn't a nice child,'' Alice Munro tells her daughter. ''Being nice meant such a terrible abdication of self.'' ''I don't want her to say this,'' Sheila admits, afraid of what it might mean, especially in contrast to herself, a daughter who is ''compliant, eager to please, good.'' ''I was nice. . . . Did I abdicate my self?'' she worries. Is Sheila, a writer struggling under the long shadow of her mother, lacking that essential selfish self, the artistic self who insists on her own needs before any other's? This anxious question is the subtext of her book.
''She has spoken often of her art for dissembling, for concealment, which, for a writer, can be very advantageous, allowing her to remain free and detached, almost without a self,'' Sheila reports of her mother. Writing, Alice Munro has suggested, was a means of ''leapfrogging'' over the issue of self, presumably creating elaborate fictional counterparts as a means of camouflage. But perhaps this is disingenuous, an instance of the admitted dissembling?
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. As with other taboos, breaking this one exacts a price. 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.
by Kathryn Harrison
Submitted on April 2, 2010 in By David.
