Sheila Munro, the eldest of three daughters, has struggled against low literary self-esteem, for it is not easy being the daughter of one of the world’s greatest living short story writers. Yet it was the famous mother who invited the daughter to write her biography, and it was the mother, who usually saves her energy for her own writing, who volunteered to babysit while the daughter wrote the book.

Part memoir, part biography, Lives of Mothers and Daughters starts very much in the manner of an animated photo album, revealing in a non-linear fashion moments from Alice and Sheila’s lives. Much of the text is given over to connecting these moments and more elaborate biographical threads to episodes in Alice’s fiction, a technique that becomes rather trite after a while. For example, Sheila informs the reader that like Rose in “The Beggar Maid,” and unlike Del in Lives of Girls and Women, Alice did win a university scholarship; and like Del and her brother, Sheila and sister Jenny tried to catch frogs in muck on hot afternoons.

The book is rich with interesting biographical content, though: Alice Laidlaw’s childhood in puritanical Wingham, Ontario, and her literary precocity; a struggle with poverty as her family’s mink, fox, and turkey farms failed. Then there is the trivia: Alice’s varicose veins, and her few literary friendships. There are also Sheila’s rites of passage: teenage hostility to her father; flirtations with the drug subculture; and radical changes in her relationship with her mother.

The Laidlaw and Munro family histories are laid out in detailed but dry fashion, with ever-zealous attention paid to every literary effort by any ancestor or relative. Strangely, Alice’s oeuvre receives only a cursory look beyond the numerous biographical connections and a detailed section on the structure and epilogue of Lives.

Sheila Munro does, however, succeed in conveying a sense of her mother’s double life as housewife/mother and literary artist, effectively dramatizing it in short scenes or images. But where Alice Munro once described people’s lives as being deep caves lined with kitchen linoleum, her daughter describes the linoleum but fails to carry us into the mysterious caves.