The revelation was a swirling betrayal – a hurricane. There are better words to describe this shock, surely. I considered “assault,” but that will not do; not in this case, certainly.
Alice Munro would have found the right phrase: a few perfectly selected words that would tell the whole story.
But the woman who wrote such eloquent stories did not share this one.
CanLit’s stomach was doing flips on Sunday as the Toronto Star revealed that Ms. Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, had been sexually abused by her stepfather, Ms. Munro’s husband, Gerald Fremlin. It began when the girl was nine and continued until her teen years, she says. And Ms. Munro, eventually, knew.
Now what are we to do? How can we read her again, ever? Her work will be viewed through a new lens – if further viewing can even be tolerated.
Syllabuses, publishers’ plans, bookstore shelves – so much rearranging to do. And then there’s the mammoth reorganization: a necessary reassessment of Ms. Munro’s work.
When she was 25, Ms. Skinner finally told her mother what happened. Disgusted, Ms. Munro left her husband and decamped to her condo in Comox, B.C.
That’s probably the wrong word, again: disgusted. I am projecting.
What was Ms. Munro actually feeling? Jealousy, it appears. Betrayal – “as if she had learned of an infidelity,” Ms. Skinner describes it. After a few months, Ms. Munro returned to her husband. Mother and daughter became estranged years later.
If these developments formed the plot of a short story, the reader might question the plausibility. The stepdad blaming the kid for seducing him? The mother going back to him? Everyone continuing on as if this hadn’t happened? The famous author complaining when her daughter, now a mother, drew a line and said her babies could not be around Mr. Fremlin? And Ms. Munro protesting about the inconvenience, because she did not drive?
But this isn’t fiction, and its reach is very long. Ms. Munro stayed with Mr. Fremlin until his death. When she died in May, she was celebrated for the magnificent writer she was, particularly for her gift in exploring the interiority of girls and women: their joys, hurts, betrayals.
How are we to read her words now?
The readers’ betrayal is obviously not the most important casualty of this cataclysm; that happened a long time ago, to Ms. Skinner, and to her family. But Ms. Munro’s legacy must be reconsidered in the dark light of this.
Like many others, I had been rereading her stories since her death. I don’t know that I can ever go back to them. I don’t think I can even keep them on the shelf. A glance that way and the ugly details will fly out from the covers and whirl around my living room – and my stomach.
There is a literal hurricane outside as I am writing this, in Texas, of all places. A little pathetic fallacy to go with this most pathetic display of human behaviour, to go with what now appears to have been a fallacy: our worship of a skilled writer who seemed so sensitive to the human condition – families, in particular.
It’s a robbery. Maybe that’s the word I was looking for: we have been robbed of a hero. This literary worship is impossible now. I have a brand-new copy of her stories sitting on my desk at home – purchased at Munro’s Books, incidentally, formerly owned by Ms. Munro’s late first husband, Jim – that I had planned to send as a gift. Now, I will not. (Munro’s, now independently owned, issued a statement Sunday, fully supporting Ms. Skinner.)
But Picasso, but Ezra Pound, but Michael Jackson – but, but, but. If these men have not been (entirely) cancelled, why should we cancel the work of Ms. Munro?
There are no shoulds here, but Ms. Munro’s art did not feel removed from her life in the way masterly paintings or modernist poems or pop songs are. The stories that Ms. Munro produced, often about dark secrets in small towns, are too close to the truth, to not only the horrible secret she kept, but the choice she made: a husband over a daughter. Horrible.
No arguments that it was a different time, etc., please. Or that she was a victim too. She was, but then she became something else with her shocking decision, choosing her abusive husband over her daughter, his victim.
And so we are left with a Nobel Prize winner who does not appear to have been noble.
Ms. Skinner never reconciled with her mother. How on Earth can we?
I can speak only for myself here: I cannot.