The Alice Munro Conundrum

A Disturbing Truth

I regard Alice Munro as an almost unparalleled short story writer.  I can’t think of anyone whose stories I admire and enjoy more.  A major part of what she writes about is the odd byways of the female psyche, women who think in ways they shouldn’t and go on to wayward behavior.  Women who don’t follow the rules.  I’ve always felt there was something brilliant about the artist and maybe a little strange about the human being, though I’d never met her.  (My first agent had, however.  She’d been Munro’s agent from the start, so I heard various stories about her through the years.)

My wife had the same reaction.  She recently read three volumes of Munro’s stories, and kept looking for a biography, because she wanted to know about the woman.  There’s been at least one major effort, but apparently it’s just a serviceable job, which sets down the facts but doesn’t get at the heart of the artist.

And now, just last week, I discover that when Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner told her that she was living with a pedophile, a man who had sexually abused Andrea when she was nine, Munro at first treated the incident as an infidelity (sex with a nine-year-old girl?), then, eventually, moved back in with a man who had not only pleaded guilty to being a pedophile, but had had sex with Munro’s own child, whom she was supposed to protect.

According to Munro’s daughter (who is speaking here), her mother reacted as follows:

“She said that she had been ‘told too late,’” Skinner wrote, that “she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”

I’ve read that paragraph multiple times.  It keeps saying the same damn thing.

I agree that, strictly speaking, it has nothing to do with her.  She didn’t apparently know about it when it was happening (though that fact seems strange, for a woman who was hyper-observant), and her daughter didn’t want to tell her, perhaps because she knew her mother loved the man.  (She did tell her stepmother, and her father, Munro’s ex.  I don’t know why he didn’t promptly go annihilate the guy.)  But Munro chose to live out her life with a known pedophile, who had assaulted her own daughter and deeply damaged her.  How could she love such a man?  And she blames a misogynistic culture for making her feel she should abandon him?  I would think a misogynistic culture would say quite the opposite.

Things get worse.  The husband, in defending himself, accused the little girl of being the seducer, and claimed he had pictures that proved it.  Excuse me, but young girls might act out with an older man who is not their biological father, but that doesn’t mean they’re to blame if something happens.  The adult is the responsible party in this situation.  He bears the blame.

Munro’s daughter is not trying to ruin her mother’s reputation.  But she wants, rightfully I would say, for this episode to be part of the conversation when someone is discussing Munro’s life and work.  Here’s how she put it:

“I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.”

I agree.  It should be part of the story.

I didn’t have any immediate plans to read more Munro, though I just reread one of her most renowned books, and enjoyed it again.  (And the women in it were weird.  It was a Munro book.)  This doesn’t diminish her as a great writer in my mind.

But it does make me want to take a break.  Over time she will merge into the canon of Great Artists Who Behaved Badly (a massive list).  Right at the moment the whole thing is a little raw.