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University of Toronto Quarterly 76.3 (2007) 874-889

'Daringly Out in the Public Eye':
Alice Munro and the Ethics of Writing Back
Robert McGill
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Toronto

... the blood relatives of an articulate artist are in a very strange bind, not only because they find that they are 'material,' but because their own material is always articulated for them by someone else who, in his voracious, voyeuristic using-up of all their lives, gets there first but doesn't always get it right.

– Philip Roth, The Counterlife, 205

It was as if she had all the talent, the vivacity, the humour, all the words, while I had ... nothing at all.

– Sheila Munro, Lives of Mothers and Daughters, 248; ellipsis in original

Sheila Munro had a long-standing ambition to become an author of fiction like her mother, the short story writer Alice Munro. In 2001 she published, instead, Lives of Mothers and Daughters, a memoir in which she articulates the difficulties of having grown up in her mother's literary shadow. Not least, she claims that her very perspective on reality has been informed by the elder Munro's fiction.

So much of what I think and 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. So unassailable is the truth of her fiction that sometimes I even feel as though I'm living inside an Alice Munro story.

(11; emphasis added)

Indeed, Sheila's world view is sufficiently infused with her mother's that her phrasing at the outset of this passage echoes a moment in Alice's fiction – in 'Material' when the narrator declares: 'Hugo's is a very good story, as far as I can tell, and I think I can tell' (Something, 35; emphasis added). In using such a careful qualifying remark and expressing self-doubt – a hallmark of Alice Munro's fiction, especially when articulated by author figures who agonize over the possible misrepresentations and ill effects of their writing – Sheila, even as she attempts in her memoir to establish a distinct identity for herself, declares her connections to Alice's fiction through her use of language as well as explicitly. By choosing to tell her story in non-fiction, Sheila distances herself from her mother, perhaps even trumping her by telling the 'real' story of the senior Munro's life, but also [End Page 874] implicitly admits her debt and suggests that fiction of the aesthetic calibre achieved by her mother is beyond her.

In writing her memoir, Sheila seems to be living inside an Alice Munro story in another way, too. The possibility that an author's intimate relation might end up aligning herself more closely with the author while meaning to individuate herself through writing is not only raised in Lives of Mothers and Daughters, it is also examined in 'Material,' the very text that Sheila echoes and a metafiction that encourages readers to consider the complexities bound up with the act of replying to fiction. First collected in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), 'Material' features an unnamed narrator whose situation is, in some respects, not dissimilar to Sheila's: she is the intimate relation of an author – more precisely, the ex-wife of a writer named Hugo – who, identifying her husband's fiction as autobiographical, attempts to respond to it by asserting her own side of the story. Thus, even as she attempts to distance herself from him, she shows herself to be maintaining an affective bond with him and living in the thrall of his narratives.

'Material' is also a metafiction about the ethics of writing fiction. The narrator is preoccupied with Hugo's callous treatment of their neighbour, Dotty, and with her sense that a story he has written about Dotty years later perpetuates that behaviour. In other words, 'Material' considers the relationship between ethical writing and ethical living...

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