Rachel Aviv reports on the terrible conundrum of Alice Munro for The New Yorker. Munro was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and perhaps the most acclaimed writer of short stories of our time, but her legacy darkened after her death when her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed that Munro’s partner had sexually abused her beginning when she was nine years old. The crime was known in the family, but even after a criminal conviction of Gerald Fremlin, Munro stood by him, at the expense of her relationship with Skinner. In her piece, Aviv explores how, and why, a writer of such astonishing powers of empathy could betray her own child, and discusses the ways that Munro touched on this family trauma in fiction. “Her writing makes you think about art at what expense,” she tells David Remnick. “That’s probably a question that is relevant for many artists, but Alice Munro makes it visible on the page. It felt so literal—like trading your daughter for art.”
Chapter 1: Who is Alice Munro and why is she significant?
Well, the interview with Daphne Merkin was the tipping point for Andrea, where she felt like... What year is it? I think it was 2004. And she felt like she was just being erased. And that was what prompted her to go to the police and report the abuse.
How did the police react to that report?
I talked to the detective and he was, you know, praising her for being this, like, incredibly straightforward witness who looks him in the eye. And, you know, and she had these incredible letters to back it up. Like, she was handing him the perpetrator's confession.
And what came out of that investigation?
It was sort of patched up really quickly. He pled guilty to indecent assault. There was no jury.
It was a one-sentence admission of guilt in which the first-person pronoun was dropped.
Yeah. And then there was a letter that he wrote to his lawyer basically saying the trial strategy is to exclude the press. And at the time of the court case, Alice had planned to leave him and to move in with her friend who had an empty house for her. And then abruptly she canceled the plan.
Because in a sense, in publicity terms, they got away with it. It didn't blow it. And we should say also that Alice Munro in Canada... Her reputation was immense. People referred to her as the queen of the literary scene there. It was, you know, people here probably at that time knew other writers, Toni Morrison or John Updike, much more than Alice Munro somehow.
But in Canada, it was a different story, no?
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Chapter 2: What traumatic events impacted Alice Munro's family?
Andrea, the daughter, told members of her family about it when it happened, including her father, Jim Monroe. But nobody wanted to tell Alice Monroe. Nobody wanted to upset her. And years later, when Jerry Fremlin admitted to the abuse, Alice stood by him. She gradually lost contact with her daughter, Andrea.
Rachel, we spoke before the break about how the media ignored this story for many years, and it kind of mirrors the way Alice Monroe's family dealt with it. You spoke with Andrea Skinner repeatedly and at great length. Here's a recording she made for a survivor's group in Canada called The Gatehouse.
I was estranged from most of my family for many years. Though I had told most of my family about the abuse when I was 10 years old, no action was taken to protect me. And I was sent back to my stepfather's house in Unfortunately, nobody did anything to stop it or help me heal at that time.
And the effects of that were that I felt really devalued and even dehumanized by not just my abuser, but all of the significant people of my life.
So her siblings as well as her mother shut her out?
There was this sense of, like, we all need to protect our mother. And this feeling that she was very horribly fragile and that, like, this refrain in the family, like, she'll die if she knows.
Mm-hmm.
And the sisters kind of took their cue from the parents. Jenny tried to tell her mother. And actually, Sheila almost told her mother. But they both, there was this kind of mythology of like, we must not impinge on this great, great career and on this fragile woman.
Now, you spoke with Robert Thacker, who's a biographer of Alice Munro. He knew about the abuse. What was his rationale as a scholar, as a biographer, to ignore this incredibly pivotal, on the criminal record piece of news?
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Chapter 7: How does Rachel Aviv approach the story of Alice Munro?
The sense of dissociation is incredible.
Yeah. But Andrea said, you know, when I read that letter, at first I kind of felt pain for my mother because I know that feeling of, you know, aimlessly walking around the city. And then she said the next feeling I had was rage that like she did a day of that and sort of moved on to have this incredibly productive life. And I still feel like I'm walking aimlessly around the city.
Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize. How did Andrea react to that news?
I think what was hardest for her was watching Jenny receive the prize from the king of Sweden because Alice was too weak at that point to go to Sweden. And she felt like, oh, you know, the family really is happier that I'm not in it. Now they can live this one reality together.
How do you think this affects Alice Munro's literary legacy and how we'll read her in the future? I know lots of people that at first they said, I'm never going to read her again. Your colleague, Jiayang Fan, who was teaching Alice Munro, I just had lunch with her. It just rocked her in a most elemental way. How do you think that will affect Alice Munro's being read in the future?
A question that feels almost more alive to me is the way that her writing makes you think about art at what expense. Not to sort of deny that it's art and that it has value as art, but to think about what existed in its wake, sort of who was harmed, what was sacrificed. And that's probably a question that is relevant for many artists, but Alice Munro kind of makes it visible on the page.
Like, it felt so literal, like, you know, trading your daughter for art.
It felt like— And you see it that way?
Not as if it were necessarily a conscious decision, but I think Alice did speak with a lot of self-awareness about how she abandoned her mother as she was dying because she felt like she couldn't be the person she wanted to be if she was a good daughter. And that person was a writer.
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