From The New Yorker Radio Hour: Rachel Aviv on Alice Munro’s Family Secrets
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What shocking revelation did Alice Munro's daughter share?
Hi, In the Dark listeners, it's Madeline. Our team is hard at work at a new story. But in the meantime, I thought you'd be interested in hearing this episode from the New Yorker Radio Hour. It's an interview with one of my favorite writers at the New Yorker, Rachel Aviv, talking with New Yorker editor David Remnick about her latest astounding story. It's about the writer Alice Munro. Alice Munro is one of the most acclaimed short story writers of our time. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The New Yorker published more than 50 of her stories. But after Munro died, her daughter Andrea Skinner came forward with a shocking revelation. Andrea revealed that she had been sexually abused as a child by her mother's husband.
And she revealed that her mother, the famed writer Alice Munro, upon learning of the abuse, chose to remain with her husband. In this episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour, Rachel Aviv takes us through her reporting, including her reexamination of several of Monroe's short stories, stories that now appear to have been fictionalizing the secret story of her own family. Keep listening for the full episode and be sure to follow the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Alice Munro was a master of the short story in our time, the Chekhov of her era. She published more than 50 stories in the New Yorker, and then in 2013, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But shortly before her death, her legacy darkened when her youngest daughter, Andrea, revealed that she'd been sexually abused by Monroe's longtime partner. This began when Andrea was just nine years old, and it was kept secret in the family even after the man confessed to it in letters. And so now Monroe's ardent readers, and there are a great many of us, are left with this terrible conundrum that a writer of such astonishing powers of empathy could betray her own child.
In one of the most astonishing pieces of reporting that the magazine has had the honor of publishing in recent years, Rachel Aviv explores the story of Alice Munro and her art, and the terrible secret of her life, and the lives of her family. I thought we should begin by talking about Alice Munro as a writer. She published 50 short stories at The New Yorker, at least. And there were people around the office for years who considered her in many ways, you know, the Chekhov of the 20th century. Tell me a little bit about her qualities as a writer.
I'm not sure that there's another writer where you can read the short story so many new times and each time feel like your understanding has shifted. To me, there's something beyond the sort of incredibly astute descriptions of people's inner lives. There's something formally that she's sort of turned the short story into and sort of stretched the limits of it.
What's the work about, really?
I mean, it's interesting looking at the Nobel Prize presentation. The secretary is pretty on point. He says she writes about the silent and the silenced, the people who don't make choices, the people who... only understand sort of aspects of their life years later when it's been revealed. Many of her early books are about this kind of poor, rural upbringing where children are pretty cruel to each other and parents are neglectful and there are a lot of horrific sort of freak events that happen quickly. She kind of writes about each phase of her life as she passes through it, not necessarily about herself, but about people going through sort of crises of middle age and then the crises of late age. And I think her stories...
are unique in the way that they kind of skip forward, like suddenly you're 15 years forward in time, and someone is sort of only grasping what happened in their past belatedly. The thing that feels sort of most present for me in terms of her writing is the sense that, like, she'd be moving through the world and someone would say something and then those words would feel, like, alive to her.
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