Probably just about all of you know about the Alice Munro affair; there have been countless articles and editorials and Substacks exploring and opining about it. If you do know, you can skip the next paragraph. But in case you don’t:
Alice Munro was a great Canadian writer and Nobel laureate. She died this past May at the age of ninety-two. On July 7th, almost two months after her death, Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner published an essay in the Toronto Star in which she revealed that she was repeatedly abused at the age of nine by her mother’s second husband Gerald Fremlin. Skinner’s biological father was the first to fail the little girl; when he learned what had happened, he forbade Andrea and her stepbrother to tell Alice about it on the grounds that it would “kill her.” The abuse continued. When Andrea finally told her mother in 1992 (she was at that point twenty-five), her mother’s response was petulant and callous. She initially left “Gerry” and, according to Andrea’s sister Jenny, “It was chaos and mayhem and hysterical actions all around. But the focus was not on Andrea. Everyone was afraid Gerry was going to kill himself, which he had repeatedly threatened to do.” Gerry wrote letters to Andrea’s father claiming that the child had sexually pursued him; he called Andrea a “homewrecker” and said he would kill her if the police were called; Alice returned to Gerry because, she said, she “loved him too much;” he was welcomed back into the family. When Andrea finally went to the police with her accusations in 2005—she could support her charges with incriminating letters he’d written—he received a suspended sentence and two years probation. He continued to be embraced by the family as Alice’s husband.
That is just the bare outline of the story; Andrea Skinner’s essay is now behind a paywall, but here’s the link anyway. Andrea’s sister and brother-in-law also published pieces describing how they came to collude in their sister’s suffering; the more you learn, the more dismal it gets.
I hesitated to comment on the ugly thing because I felt a kind of paralysis about it and because my basic reaction was so thoroughly expressed by so many: I felt real anger and disillusionment that made me feel naive, even stupid. Other seemingly less credulous people have observed that they were not shocked by the revelation because they know that such things happen all the time. I also know that such things happen all the time. Such a thing happened to me. Still I was shocked or at least very dismayed about Alice Munro. Because she was Alice Munro. On hearing about it I actually texted a friend “This makes me feel like there’s nothing good anywhere.” How childish! I had not realized that I needed to make someone into an ideal, particularly an ideal mother. But apparently I did.
At least I didn’t go as apeshit as some people I saw on chat threads announcing that they are going to put her books in the garbage or throw them in the street and then run them over until they are pulped. But it may be awhile before I feel like reading something by her. And if I were still teaching I wouldn’t want to teach Munro’s stories right now, even though I taught her lovingly for decades.
But this is where my reaction gets complicated. I feel a strange confusion. I feel actually somewhat unmoored. Because I don’t believe in rejecting works of art or even necessarily seeing them differently because the artist turns out to be personally awful and/or immoral. Most people I know don’t either. In fact, a few days after learning that Munro chose her pedophiliac husband over her daughter, I was at a dinner with some writers/teachers and one of them asked why I wouldn’t teach her, like how could I be such a pill? I said “Because right now I have too much visceral disgust.” He said Would you stop teaching Chekhov because he was an antisemite? Would you say we shouldn’t teach Homer if we learned he buggered boys, would you— “Fuck you,” I replied. “Just fuck you.” This is not how I normally talk to colleagues.
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