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.”
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
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
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.
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