The book world has been in disarray since the revelation over the weekend by Alice Munro’s daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, that the recently deceased Nobel prize-winning author sided with her husband, Gerald Fremlin, when Skinner told her that he (her stepfather) had abused her as a child.
Amid the recriminations and the reappraisals of Munro, the matter of prime importance following Skinner’s article about her experiences is to think seriously about her story—before attending to the matter of Munro’s reputation and body of work. What Skinner says about systems of abuse, patriarchal power, and the way that both fame and the family unit can crush individuals in their midst is gravely serious. Here in the UK, the CSA Centre reports that the family environment accounted for almost half of all child sexual abuse offences reported to the police in England and Wales in 2023; these statistics are reflected worldwide. Fathers and stepfathers are the relatives most commonly convicted of intra-familial child sexual abuse.
Skinner’s article tells us—perhaps that should be reminds us—how the cycle of silencing works. She details her father’s silence on the subject after she reported Fremlin’s sexual assault to him: Jim Munro didn’t discuss the assault with his ex-wife, and continued to allow his daughter to stay with Alice Munro and her husband. Alice Munro left her child with Fremlin while she went to China, not considering safeguarding issues—Fremlin issued death threats after Skinner told her mother what had happened. Alice Munro stayed with Fremlin despite what she heard about his actions. This is the culture of denial that Skinner’s article describes so well: after her revelations to her family, as an adult, Skinner tells us that they all continued to pretend that nothing had happened for 10 years, before Skinner finally broke off all contact with her mother.
What seems a little surprising following the publication of Skinner’s piece is the calibre of reactions to what is, in fact, a not unusual experience. It’s normal for people to experience shock, because Munro is such a deeply beloved figure and one of the most important writers of her generation—but what Skinner tells us is, unfortunately, almost a routine story of abuse within the family. The family unit is also the scene of commonplace domestic violence and femicide. These things are known.
Perhaps what shocked most readers is that Munro—who found her greatest fame later on in life—was known to most people as a twinkly-seeming old woman; her stories show deep reserves of humanity and understanding. How could such a person conspire with her husband to suppress her daughter’s story? I think there is a degree of naivety in that viewpoint—not least because that experience of a mother siding with her male partner over her child must, at least mathematically, be a common one, given the prevalence of child sexual abuse within the family. Margaret Atwood said as much this week, telling the Daily Beast: “One noteworthy thing for me is that Alice was from small town southwestern Ontario at a time when such things were swept under the carpet as a matter of course.” These stories are legion. The 2023 film Memory, indeed, focuses on a victim of child sexual abuse whose mother reacts negatively, calling her daughter a fantasist.
Munro herself protests, in her daughter’s account of their clash, “that she had been ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if [Skinner] expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men.” This position is understandably given short shrift by Skinner in her telling—she is darkly ironic and dismissive of Munro’s quisling feebleness here; and yet it would be an insensitive person indeed who could deny the import of those considerations; their half-truth also. Though Munro would surely have been financially independent at the time, and though she acted monstrously, the decision facing her would not have been an easy one. A product of her time, she came of age as an adult in the 1950s, when women depended on men greatly and were less sexually free; those considerations would have been built into her character, no matter how liberated she was able to become over the course of her life.
None of this excuses Munro’s actions; but it does, I think, help explain them. And—unfortunately for those who have rushed to reject her work in the wake of these revelations—what most helps explain Munro’s behaviour is her vast body of work, which returns again and again to the subject of dark family secrets; to deceptions and betrayals; to women making mistakes and living with their choices. In “Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You”—that title now coloured, or informed, as all Munro’s work must now be, by what we know—Munro peers with her customarily gimlet eye into the rivalry between two sisters, Et and Char; there is a lifetime of bitter resentment between these now old women, dating back to teenage loves they experienced decades back. There is a disquieting violence, too, that bleeds into the story. In her masterly story, “Family Furnishings” (again, what a title) the narrator—a writer—feels contempt for her father’s cousin, Alfrida, before learning a shocking family secret.
Violence and misery are never far; Munro’s women are often strong and stubborn, even wayward, but their existences are precarious. In “Passion”, another brilliant story from Munro’s astonishing late stage, a young woman throws away an easy life with her fiancé by running off with his mercurial, suicidal brother on a whim. Munro coolly notes how compromised women’s lives are by the choices they must make in a patriarchal world.
“There’s nothing sentimental about Munro’s work,” writes Terrence Rafferty in a New York Times review of one of her story collections. You can say that again. Munro’s stories are even what you might call brutal. Atwood emphasises this when she says that “there are dark secrets that come to light in much of her work. That part of the world, where Alice came from, was very Gothic…. Gothic is very much about secrets. Crimes in cellars. The trusted person turning out to be a werewolf. That was Alice’s real-life background.” Constantly, while digging away at the fragility of women’s lives, at the twisted knots that bind us in our families and relationships, Munro resorts to a kind of unflinching brutality, which meshes shockingly with her otherwise painstaking descriptions of everyday lives. Her work gives the clues. As a society, we must have a sufficiently complex understanding of history, literature, pyschology, gender and patriarchy to understand Munro’s behaviour towards her daughter alongside her work, and vice versa.
A postscript. Two years after Andrea Robin Skinner decided to sever all links with her mother, Alice Munro wrote a trilogy of stories about a woman, Juliet, who is young when we first meet her; she meets a man, Eric; they have a child called Penelope; Juliet becomes famous; and Penelope grows up in a bohemian sort of world; before finally rejecting her mother. Late in life, Juliet and Penelope are wholly estranged. Throughout the stories, Munro threads elements to clue us into the fact that Juliet may have been a less-than-perfect mother to her child—and in the final story of the trilogy, “Silence”, Juliet is riven with doubts and guilt.
The whole story, which had perhaps not been thought of as autobiographical, is now reframed. Munro, surely, is wrestling with her own complicity here. The whole story makes for painful reading, from Juliet’s bitter assessment of what she sees as her daughter’s embrace of woowoo spirituality, to her later loneliness and denial as an old woman whose fame is waning. Munro seems to at once let Juliet off, showing her in all her foolhardy complexity, and to castigate her, showing her egotism and weakness. She discusses her daughter’s estrangement, with a friend:
“Actually, I didn’t do anything so terrible,” Juliet said then, brightening up. “Why do I keep lamenting that it’s my fault? She’s a conundrum, that’s all. I need to face that. A conundrum and a cold fish,” she added, in a parody of resolution.
“No,” Christa said.
“No,” Juliet said. “I know that’s not true.”
