Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

got divorced then and had a lively time for maybe half a dozen years and then got married again. This was almost a pattern in our lives.” Munro’s “Jakarta” explores such a moment.
    Sheila Munro details the ways of the Munro family, remembering her mother hating “the image of the mother who disapproved of everything, who had a different set of values, the mother who was at the ironing board.” This sort of persona grew from Alice Munro’s determination “to be as different from her own mother as possible.” Sheila alsomakes it clear that her mother now has misgivings about this, thinking that she “didn’t establish enough of a mother’s authority, so that it left [Sheila] dangling without this natural reference point” in personally and culturally turbulent times. Sheila offers an extended quotation that speaks to Munro’s sense of herself as a mother at that time and suggests how her attitudes might have accentuated her growing differences with Jim. Alice recalled, speaking to Sheila,
    I was into my own role but this had to be seen through the tremendous change of values that came in the late sixties and that split women of my age. Some women decided to go against it, some women decided to be like their mothers. I wanted to be as if I were ten years younger. With the women of thirty-five, women born in the early nineteen-thirties, there was a big problem about how to be an adult in this period, not only because prejudice against adults was so firm (Abbie Hoffman saying anyone over thirty couldn’t be trusted) but also justified in my eyes. The times had a lot to do with the kind of mother I was to you and Jenny (then), but not earlier. There was more to let you be yourselves but it was also to let me be myself so I wasn’t engaged in the terribly serious business of making you into the kind of people I thought you should be. I didn’t have any notions about that. We were in this adventure.
    Meanwhile Jim was a parent who did think that his daughters should be shaped. As Sheila makes clear, he was the one who arranged for and took her to lessons, who worried over clothes and friends, who had expectations of her. Given such views, the temper of the times, and his own conservative outlook, having a wife less than two years younger than he was who wanted to act considerably younger, who wanted to argue about Vietnam, who acquiesced to the counterculture then everywhere evident, must have flummoxed Jim Munro. Alice, a rebellious wife, one often “ready for battle” – a phrasing Jim used about her “when he found her moody and volatile,” according to Sheila – continued to change, becoming increasingly dissatisfied with her situation. By thetime she was at work on
Lives of Girls and Women
during 1970, she had decided that her only means of personal survival was to escape the bonds of her marriage.
    That summer Alice, Jim, and Sheila toured Ireland for three weeks, leaving thirteen-year-old Jenny at home with a sitter and Andrea in a playschool. Sheila recounts returning to her parents’ room unannounced during the trip and finding her mother weeping, obviously in the midst of a fight. At another point, she recalls an argument in which “my mother picks up a plate and flings it at my father, except she tosses the plate slowly and without conviction and he ducks from the path of its wobbly flight. It hits the wall behind him.” Recalling these times years later, Munro stated that “when a marriage is breaking up … you use all kinds of things to mask what is the real problem. Lots of times you just try to deceive yourself to make a go of it. I still think it was a good thing it broke – it wasn’t that good for the children, but it was good for me and for Jim.” 4

    Unlike most marriage breakups, the Munros’ was rendered subsequently in a succession of Alice’s stories. In “Material,” the narrator at one point says she “was not able fully to protect or expose” her husband Hugo, “only to flog him with blame, desperate sometimes, feeling I would claw his head open to pour my vision into it, my notion of what had to be understood.” Earlier she admits that when she was married to Hugo she never had confidence in him as a writer since she “believed that writers were calm, sad people, knowing too much. I believed that there was a difference about them, some hard and shining, rare intimidating quality they had from the beginning, and Hugo didn’t have it.” Munro wrote these