Just over a decade ago, when James Wood wrote about four memoirs by the children of writers, I wondered why he’d left out Sheila Munro’s Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro (2001). True, Wood’s essay, “Sins of the Father,” was about Cheever, Malamud, Styron, Bellow, and patriarchy in postwar America. But even a passing mention of Munro, I thought at the time, might have served to remind us that “the storm of assertion”—Wood’s phrase for the self-justification that often goes with writing—need not always clear “a brutal path” through a writer’s family. The portrait of Alice Munro by her eldest child, Sheila, was loving, and I believed it.
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