Sheila Munro, the Powell River writer who also happens to be the daughter of world-renowned short story writer Alice Munro, will be in Sechelt for a reading on May 3.
Sheila's writing career has featured a concentration on parent-child relationships. Her books include How to Enjoy Being a Parent and, most notably, The Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro.
Lives offers a rare, privileged glimpse of Alice Munro's life (Lives of Girls and Women, for example, the collection Sheila's own title echoes, was written in a laundry room), and it presents biographical insights into Munro's stories. But it is more than a biography. The book is also a memoir of Sheila's own struggle with the mixed blessing of being the child of a great author. As Sheila says of her mother, "So unassailable is the truth of her fiction that sometimes I even feel as though I'm living inside an Alice Munro story." Sheila needed to write her way into her own story, and in Lives we see a talented writer emerging from the long shadow of her brilliant mother.
The reading will be at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt at 8 p.m. on Friday, May 3. Admission is free, courtesy of the Canada Council.
