The bookstore co-founded by Alice Munro says many readers and writers will be divided over the author’s legacy after learning she chose to stay married to the man who sexually assaulted her daughter.
Munro’s Books, now an independent Victoria business, said in a statement that it supports Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, who revealed in the Toronto Star that the assaults committed by his stepfather remained a family secret for decades.
Ontario author Zoe Whittall praised M’s courageme Skinner and said that while she was devastated by her story, she was never surprised to learn that a mother would choose her husband over her child.
Whittall’s 2016 novel The Best Kind of People deals with similar themes, and she wrote on social media that the woman in this book returns to her husband because it is common.
Prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates has argued on social media that Munro’s attitudes could have manifested themselves in different ways in her work.
She says that in Munro’s stories, which highlight family relationships in small-town Ontario, “often terrible men are valued, forgiven and approved of.”
American author Joyce Maynard, who says she is rereading Munro’s work this summer after the author’s death in May, says Skinner’s story is painful but should not be ignored.
Despite everything, she said, she “will never stop admiring – and studying – Alice Munro’s work.”