The literary world is struggling to come to terms with Alice Munro’s legacy after learning she chose to stay married to the man who sexually abused her daughter. Some say it fundamentally changes the way they will read her work from now on, if they choose to continue reading it.
Munro’s Books in Victoria, founded by Mme Munro and her first husband Jim Munro, said she supports their youngest daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, who revealed Sunday in the Toronto Star that the abuse committed by his stepfather Gerald Fremlin remained a family secret for decades.
“Like so many readers and writers, we will need time to absorb this news and the impact it may have on the legacy of Alice Munro, whose work and connection to the bookstore we have already celebrated,” the business, which is now independently owned, said in a statement on its website.
“It’s been a very difficult time for everyone at the bookstore,” bookstore associate manager Jessica Walker said Monday.
Overcoming the dichotomy
While some have taken firm positions – the columnist for Globe and MailMarsha Lederman, wrote that she would no longer read Alice Munro’s work and hoped that reading lists and curricula would be reconsidered — others have advocated a more measured approach.
Clementine Morrigan, a writer whose work explores issues of childhood sexual abuse and incest, said there is a tendency toward dichotomy when these complex topics are discussed.
“Either there is abuse and the person is a monster that you can never love, or you love the person and therefore there can’t really be abuse,” she summed up during a video call interview.
“So what frustrates me so much about our responses when we find out that someone who is an important figure to us […] either committed abuses or participated in them through inaction […] is that we are actually repeating this pattern.”
Instead, Mme Morrigan suggests that readers can accept both realities: that Mrs. Munro was an extremely talented writer and that she caused her daughter a great deal of suffering.
“I hate to see this play out on such a grand scale,” she said. “I think the real challenge is that we have to be willing to accept both of those facts together.”
Mme Skinner wrote in her essay that the abuse began when she was nine and continued for several years. She said she confided in her half-brother and that her father Jim Munro did not act after being told about it.
When she finally told her mother about the abuse, Mme Munro was unmoved, more concerned about how it would affect her than the trauma her daughter was going through, Ms.me Skinner.
Canadian author Michelle Dean wrote on social media that she wished Mme Skinner could share his story widely sooner.
“Someone will probably end up writing the article worrying that we’re canceling Munro, but I think this revelation only enriches and deepens my understanding of and relationship with his work,” she posted on X.
Prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates was among those who recontextualized Munro’s work in light of the new information.
“If you’ve read Munro’s fiction over the years, you’ll see how often terrible men are valorized, forgiven, empowered,” she wrote on social media Sunday.
“There seems to be a sense of resignation, an attitude that almost says ‘men will remain men’ – not in all the stories, but in some.”
A known fact
M’s biographerme Munro’s Robert Thacker told The Associated Press that he had long been aware of Skinner’s abuse at the hands of Gerald Fremlin. His book Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives was released in 2005, the same year Mr. Fremlin pleaded guilty to a charge of indecent assault.
He said he omitted it from his book because it was a “scientific analysis of his career.”
“I expected there would be repercussions at some point,” said Thacker, who added that he had even spoken to the author about it. “I don’t want to get into the details, but it destroyed the family. It was devastating in so many ways. And that’s something she talked about in depth.”
She has also addressed the issue in her writings. Mr. Thacker mentions in particular the new Silence And Runawaywhich focus on children who have become estranged from their parents. In Vandalsa woman mourns the loss of her former boyfriend, Ladner, an unstable war veteran who the reader learns assaulted his young neighbor.
American author Joyce Maynard, who said in a Facebook post that she would reread Alice Munro’s work this summer after the author’s death in May, said M’s storyme Skinner was painful, but not to be ignored.
Mme Maynard said she was commenting as an admirer of Alice Munro’s work, and also “as someone who has experienced manipulation and sexual violence at the hands of a very powerful and revered writer.”
Mme Maynard wrote about her abusive relationship with reclusive author J.D. Salinger in her memoir And before me, the world. She moved in with the writer when she was 18 and he was 53.
In his message, Mr.me Maynard points out that those who would try to discredit Mme Skinner’s efforts to attract attention should consider the kind of negative reaction people often receive when they decide to speak out against abuse.
Yet, she said, she “will never stop admiring — and studying — Alice Munro’s work.”