The Lives of Cousins, Once-Removed

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The strange familiarity of being Alice Munro’s relative.

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By Scott Henderson

Toronto Star

May 6, 2021

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Everyone is related to someone famous – a war hero, an MP, even someone in TV or the movies, if you’re lucky. In my family, that person is Alice Munro.

My mother’s first cousin was a source of fascination to me as a youngster, a literary luminary who linked me to the world of fame and celebrity. Now, with the publication of Lives of Mothers and Daughters, it’s Alice’s daughter Sheila who is in the spotlight, and once again bloodlines connect me to headlines. Subtitled Growing Up with Alice Munro, Lives of Mothers and Daughters prompts me to think about what it was like to grow up related to a world-famous writer.

As a boy, dropping the name “Alice Munro” didn’t really impress my friends. It wasn’t like I was related to a hockey player or someone who was really famous. The kind of recognition that Alice had achieved was substantial – she had won two Governor General’s Awards by 1978 – but this, it seemed, was unimpressive to most.

Not to me, though. I knew Alice was somehow “important.” Although I had never met her, in my eyes her accomplishments brought a certain amount of respectability to my family.

As a child, even though Alice had grown up and then lived in a different part of the province, it always puzzled me that my mother was not closer to her first cousin.

When I was 14, I decided it was time they became acquainted. Just before Christmas, I wrote to Alice’s publishers in Toronto and asked them to forward my letter to her.

In it, I explained who I was and asked Alice if she would mind writing a holiday greeting to my mom. After all, that was what family did, right?

As Christmas drew closer, I kept a close eye on the mailbox. Then, on Christmas Eve, I received a letter, postmarked Clinton, Ont. Enclosed was a card to my mom from Alice Munro.

Inside was a note from Alice. “Dear Eleanor - I was delighted to get a letter from your son Scott saying you remember me and that he would like to give you a Christmas letter from me. I thought it was a great idea for a 14-year-old boy to have….I think Scott believes we never met, but of course we did. I remember you when you were about six. You had blonde hair and I think brown eyes and small bones and delicate features…”

This encounter was news to me. Years later, I would be even more surprised to learn that many of Alice’s characters and settings were often based in reality, and in some instances, my reality too.

By that time, I eagerly anticipated each new collection from the author. I had come to love Alice’s stories for their detailed sense of place, the fundamental truth of her characters. But I also valued them as possible records of my own family history and read them almost like personal mysteries.

Inevitably, this approach became distracting. It was like watching a movie shot in your hometown in which you recognize landmarks – a building or certain street. They do not look like they do in real life, but they are still glaringly obvious, and their identification brings any active imagining, any driving momentum of plot, to a jarring halt.

?The difference being, in Alice’s stories, these “familiar landmarks” are not quite so obvious. From this perspective, Sheila’s memoir is a revelation. In it, she suggests some of the inspirations for her mother’s work and indicates where some of these “landmarks” originated.

“I can’t unravel the truth of my mother’s fiction from the reality of what actually happened,” she writes. “It’s as if her view of the world must be the way the world really is, because it feels so convincing, so true, that you trust her every word.”

This is the danger I confront when zealously looking for hidden meaning in Alice’s fiction. One such instance is “The Progress of Love” which, I learned from Sheila’s book, is based on what Alice knew of her grandmother Bertha Stanley, who is my great-grandmother. In the story, a woman fakes a suicide attempt to scare her womaning husband. But knowing Bertha was the inspiration for this story leads to more questions than answers. Did my great-grandmother fake a suicide? Was my great-grandfather a womanizer?

“The challenge my mother has set herself has been to recreate history imaginatively,” Sheila writes, “to give an accurate impression without recording all the details.”

But it is this lack of details that is so utterly frustrating. Ultimately, it is also the key to understanding the futility of such clue-seeking exercises. In the search for these ancestral totems, it is easy to forget that no matter how autobiographical, Alice’s stories are just that: stories.

?In the end, only a few stories are directly related to my past, none more so than “The Ottawa Valley.”

?Alice based it on her visit to her mother’s immediate relatives in Scotch Corners, a farming community in Eastern Ontario, when she was in her late teens.

Her mother was Anne Laidlaw (nee Chamney) who grew up in a farmhouse that, at the time of Alice’s visit, was the home of Anne’s brother John and his family. John was my grandfather, and this visit was the first time Alice met my mother as a young girl, as she noted in her Christmas letter to my mom.

How grateful am I for this story, in which Alice paints a lively portrait of my grandfather and provides a vivid description of my grandparents’ farm, the family church, and churchyard.

I have met Alice twice in my life: the first time, in 1995, at a Chamney family reunion; the second, in 1998 in Toronto, briefly, after a reading from her collection The Love of a Good Woman [I would meet her several more times after this at the Giller Prize]. During both of these encounters, I was less in awe of her celebrity than struck by her familiarity.

I have met many famous people over the years, from pro athletes to the Princess of Wales. But Alice must be one of the most “un-famous” of all. Modest and unassuming, she is also thoroughly humble, as she demonstrated in another letter to my mother after meeting again at the reunion.

?“A writer’s life is generally pretty boring to describe since it’s so much an adventure in solitary imagination and the (hard) learning of a craft. But it’s never boring to live because it’s so precarious. Sometimes I feel just incredibly lucky – for one thing, to have always known exactly what I wanted to do, and then, to have got my chance to do it, as well as I could.”

?I feel lucky too. Not so much for being related to a famous writer. No, more for the unique and personal bond I have with her writing, which transcends our common lineage.