‘It’s not about you, dear reader’: On Alice Munro’s moral failures

Samuel Johnson once wrote that in order to teach everyone to speak the truth, everyone likewise should learn to hear it. Yet there are times when a wall of silence builds up around the truth. Such a wall of silence came crashing down last month, shortly after the death of Canadian writer Alice Munro.

Munro died in May this year, aged 92, after a long and celebrated writing career, the pinnacle of which was the Nobel Prize for Literature. A month after her death, her daughter Andrea Skinner published a personal essay in a Canadian newspaper. She wrote that in 1976, when she was nine years old, her stepfather Gerald Fremlin had sexually abused her. The child told her stepmother and her father Jim Munro. Inexplicably, her father did nothing to stop the abuse, confront the perpetrator, or even talk to his ex-wife Alice Munro about it. As a child, Skinner continued to be sent to her mother’s house every summer. Fremlin continued to harass Skinner.

In 1992, at the age of 25, Skinner wrote a letter to her mother telling her that Fremlin had abused her. “I have been afraid all my life that you would blame me for what happened,” she wrote. Munro left Fremlin. In turn, Fremlin wrote to the family accusing Skinner of having seduced him as a child. Sometime later, Munro returned to Fremlin, and their life together. In her essay, Skinner lists the reasons Munro gave for her decision to go back to Fremlin: “She said that she had been ‘told too late,’ 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.”

The turning point

In 2004, the New York Times published a profile of Alice Munro. It referred to Cynthia Ozick’s description of Munro as “our Chekhov.” The profile writer gushed about Fremlin: “Munro invokes him frequently and affectionately as ‘my husband’ rather than by his name, like a proud Midwestern banker’s wife whose one great claim to glory is that she has married well. ‘He sounds,’ I say, ‘like the love of your life.’”

For Skinner, this profile was the turning point. “I wanted to speak out. I wanted to tell the truth.” She decided to file a police complaint. She still had Fremlin’s letters. In 2005, Fremlin pleaded guilty to the charge of indecent assault. Skinner wanted this to be the moment of reckoning and accountability for Munro: “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.”

And yet, Munro’s family stayed silent. Inexplicably, Canadian media stayed silent. The Canadian literary world stayed silent. Even Munro’s biographer, though he was informed of the abuse, chose not to write about it.

For years, Skinner remained estranged from her family. For decades, she had tried to get them to confront the fact of her abuse, but they had not listened. They had built a wall of silence around the truth.

Munro stayed with Fremlin until his death in 2013. That was also the year in which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a mother who should have protected her daughter and held her abuser accountable, Alice Munro had centred her own needs and betrayed her daughter.

Writer Brandon Taylor, who has written about his own experience of childhood sexual abuse and the silence around it, wrote a personal piece in response to Skinner’s essay. His first thought was for Skinner: “When someone believes you, but then goes on as though nothing happened, well, that is like drowning in quicksand.” Taylor also noted how some readers had reacted: centring themselves, sounding wronged and betrayed as if they were also victims: “They seemed to think immediately of the work like someone in the path of a hurricane or a wildfire thinks of their delicate artefacts and good plates. That sounds judgmental, and perhaps it is.”

Art versus artist

People can disappoint. They do it all the time in Munro’s fiction, which is built on showing how petty and mean and cruel people can be. Hard things happen to women when they try, in awkward and broken ways, to claim a bit of freedom. In Friend of My Youth, a woman has an affair with her elder sister's fiance and becomes pregnant. “Now there had to be a wedding, though not the one that had been planned.” The sister then cares for the younger woman during her long illness until her death. There is more to the story. In her youth, the narrator’s mother had known these sisters and their austere way of life among the Cameronians in the Ottawa Valley. She recognises that this is material for a story that she herself might have written but in another life. “My mother did become busy with her own life and finally a prisoner in it… In later years, when she sometimes talked about the things she might have been, or done, she would say, ‘If I could have been a writer – I do think I could have been; I could have been a writer – then I would have written the story of Flora’s life.’”

In Munro’s fiction, women examine each other’s lives with an unsparing gaze. The narrator reflects on how they have both tried to become free. “My mother’s ideas were in line with some progressive notions of her times, and mine echoed the notions that were favoured in my time. This, in spite of the fact that we both believed ourselves independent, and lived in backwaters that did not register such changes.”

In Munro’s 1993 story “Vandals,” a woman returns to the physical location where she had been sexually abused as a child: “And places where Liza thinks there is a bruise on the ground, a tickling and shame in the grass.” She proceeds to vandalise her abuser’s home.

A certain kind of celebrity status over the years had turned Munro into a gentle, iconic Canadian grandma with wispy white hair. Nevertheless, those who have read her fiction have encountered the cruelty and brutality that men and women are capable of, as well as the force that makes them carry on. One character says of another: “You better not cross him or he’ll skin you alive.” In her stories are taxidermists who skin animals, women who steal their sisters’ lovers, and people who repeatedly practise self-denial. There are desperate girls and women, and painful choices. There are aftermaths.

None of this can for even a moment be used to explain in any way Munro's grotesque choices in real life. Nor should it. No legacy is worth this. Alice Munro committed a terrible injustice against her daughter, and the entire bookshelf of her works and her awards cannot make up for a moment of the pain caused to Andrea Skinner by her mother’s actions. Victims of child sexual abuse deserve healing. They deserve to be heard. They deserve reparation.

A part of that reparation, as Skinner has said, is that Munro’s writing should never again be read without an awareness of her failures as a person. Reading isn’t an act of adoration. It isn’t an expression of solidarity. We aren’t the better or worse for the choice of books on our bookshelves; we are defined by the choices we make in life, including what we bring to the act of reading. To approach the fiction written by a flawed person as a reader, while wrestling with the reality of their flaws, is not the same as being complicit, or perpetuating their wrongs. To refuse to engage at all with a person’s work because they are a flawed person is to centre one’s own sense of victimhood as a reader. It’s not about you, Dear Reader.

The presentation speech for Munro’s Nobel Prize praised her work for its understanding of the human heart: “Over the years, numerous prominent scientists have received their well-deserved reward in this auditorium for having solved some of the great enigmas of the universe or of our material existence. But you, Alice Munro, like few others, have come close to solving the greatest mystery of them all: the human heart and its caprices.”

Munro’s fiction will not offer a solution to the mystery of her own moral failure. But art was never a purifying bath in which the reader can take a dip to feel sanctified. The world is what it is. Art provides a glimpse of what that might be.

And so, finally, these revelations are a reminder that at some level, even separating art and life is specious. Art is not just a product to be bought and sold. It is not a thing to be found only in the fiction pages of The New Yorker. Art is a way of expressing the life that is lived. More important than any art or artist is how we live that life, and how we treat each other. And there is creativity and moral force in being a good parent to a child, and in standing up against injustice.

Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta is a civil servant.