Teaching Alice Munro
Staggering news emerged in the Toronto Star regarding Alice Munro when Andrea Skinner, Munro’s youngest daughter, published an essay on July 7, 2024, entitled “My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him.”
I pause here to extend to Andrea Skinner my sadness for her lifelong loneliness, my concern for her well-being, my admiration for her courage, and my gladness that she has found support from her siblings, help from the Gatehouse, and joy in her work.
Gerald Fremlin, Alice Munro’s second husband, repeatedly sexually abused Andrea when she was nine years old in 1975; two years later in 1977, neighbors informed Munro that Fremlin had exposed himself to their own daughter. Munro seemed unable to make the connections in 1977.
When Andrea was 25 and informed Munro of the abuse, Fremlin defended himself in a letter and threatened Andrea should she go public. Munro first fled her husband and then returned to him. To Andrea, Munro dismissed her own responsibility in any of it. This was between Andrea and Fremlin.
Later, in 2005, when Andrea pressed charges against Fremlin and Fremlin admitted his guilt, Munro’s relationship with her daughter gradually and irretrievably broke down, the key event being Andrea’s refusal to let Fremlin see her children and Munro’s refusal to drive by herself to visit her daughter and her grandchildren.
Time after time, Munro silenced her daughter. In effect, Munro preserved her reputation at the price of the silence she required of her daughter.
The story is complicated by the number of people who knew about the abuse at the time but kept silent: many in the family in 1975, plus later the police, the lawyers and the court in the immediate community, as well as Robert Thacker, Munro’s biographer.
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Teaching Munro has always been a complex endeavor. None of this dumfounding news might be of significance for students of Munro’s work except for this. In her fiction, Munro investigates similar situations such as Andrea details in her essay: pedophilia, secrecy, betrayal, weakness, the mistreatment of children, the submission of women, the imposition of harm through acts of commission or omission, the nature of guilt and the possibility of guilt’s atonement or expiation. These topics permeate Munro’s writing, along with a side interest in the nuts and bolts of modern sainthood.
In particular, consider the challenges of teaching “Vandals,” “Dimensions,” and “Powers.” These brilliant stories appear, to me, in this new light, to be investigating a problem and working a defense. They also appear to be acts of atonement, except that they are acts of atonement addressed to me and to you, members of Munro’s immense readership. The stories do not seem to be addressed to the one person in the most need, the one whom Fremlin abused and then threatened, the one he hurt the most, and the one Alice denied.
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All of this suggests we need to re-think how we teach Munro’s short stories. In short, we do not know yet what we do not know.
For that reason, I believe that universities and high schools should postpone teaching Alice Munro’s work until the spring. High schools, in particular, need to proceed with extreme caution. Time is required to develop a responsible curriculum that adapts to the new information. Any college curriculum would preferably be team-taught by relevant departments such as literature and psychology. Adequate preparation should be made with the health center should students who have been abused or silenced need access to help.
Some students in any class now taught on Munro will have experienced abuse or incest; some of these students will have experienced a real or implicit threat of murder should they reveal the truth; some of these students will have experienced incest/and or violence within the bizarre thinking that typifies an alcoholic family; some of these students may realize for the first time the multiple depths of how they have been betrayed and by whom; some of these students will be acutely aware of having been dismissed or silenced by members of their own family; some of these students will re-experience trauma in the course of the class.
Professors and teachers need to be aware that students may make serious revelations to them. Such professors and teachers need to be ready and prepared to provide serious and immediate help in the form of connections to counseling, treatment centers and the police.
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I question whether college professors and high school English teachers should proceed, business as usual, with teaching Alice Munro this fall.
We do not yet know what we do not know.
Please read Andrea Skinner’s July 7th 2024 essay in The Toronto Star for yourself here.
To me, what is especially telling is that Andrea knew, at the age of nine, that she couldn’t tell her mother. And that her father and stepmother tried to protect her by sending along her older sisters when she visited Alice, but nobody felt they could tell Alice the truth. They all knew Alice and they weren’t wrong. When Andrea finally found the courage her mother reacted as she (and her family) more or less expected.
I’ve loved Munro’s work for it’s insight into human nature and its dissection of human relationships, especially, as you say, Betsy, power dynamics in relationships.
Knowing now how she treated her daughter I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to read her again. Certainly I need a long break.
Welcome, Ellen. Yes. What we know now is difficult to unsee.
For instance, I imagine Andrea as a college student reading the stories that were written about the time Andrea was 9 and 10 and 11. The stories in the Beggar Maid.
Or, the story I have coming up. “Dimensions.”
How shall I read that story? As if I were in a lit-crit class? As if I were in a team-taught class. not just literature, but also psychology, ethics, law, counseling, and history? (Well, that would be difficult. That would be a book. That would take a while.)
Or shall I read “Dimensions” as if I were Andrea? For me, I think, I will only be able to read Munro now and for a long while, as if I were Andrea.
Well-articulated POV by Betsy but I couldn’t be more opposed, TBH. This POV is moralism of the worst kind. Simplistic, childlike, unevolved. That’s just my take. It’s not a personal attack on Betsy. But: Universities should postpone teaching Munro’s work? Should they postpone teaching the work of every other individual who wasn’t a 100% squeaky clean never-did-anything-wrong-in-their-life certified good person according to whatever the fickle whims of mid-2024 might be? I suppose the music departments should excise that evil wifebeater Miles Davis and the poets shouldn’t teach that damn dastardly anti-Semite Ezra Pound and let’s make sure the film department doesn’t screen anything made by Miramax and that serial sex criminal Harvey Weinstein.
I cannot see recommendations to pause scholarship as anything other than censoriousness confusion. Everyone has the right to read what they want or not. If an individual wants to unquestioningly believe any given allegation or unproven claim (made after Munro’s death when she can’t even defend herself or give her side of the story), that’s their choice. But an education requires engaging with important works of art made by people who in their private life were flawed and harmful to others. This should be, again, in my opinion, a very basic barrier of entry to serious academic discussion, the simple, adult, mature ability to make an art-vs-artist distinction.
Even if Munro were proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be the assailant herself, it simply wouldn’t have anything to do with the value of her literature. Poe, de Sade, Caravaggio, William Burroughs; we could craft list after list of “bad people” who are proven murderers or rapists or whatever other type of criminal. Why would we stop teaching their work or advocate for an arbitrary time period of pause (don’t teach Munro’s works until Spring 2025? what would that possibly accomplish?)? That makes no sense. Learning does not equal “re-experiencing trauma,” learning equals learning.
PS: Professors and teachers receive training on how to deal with a student who chooses to confide personal experiences of violation, and offering “connections to counseling, treatment centers, and the police” are potentially laudable goals, although teachers and profs also have to protect themselves legally, and advocating for the intercession of the police can go seriously wrong and have the opposite of the intended healing/protective effect. Referring someone to an on-campus/in-school counselor or expert, sure! Implying that a student is ill or broken and hence needs “treatment” at a treatment center or that they should involve law enforcement and entangle themselves in potentially irrevocable police matters; those are much dicier positions.
Sean, I welcome your thoughtful, carefully crafted comment. I can easily grasp your point of view and reasoning. Thank you for that.
But I am not so sure I agree with your assessment of my remarks as simplistic or childlike or moralistic. I merely mean it will take some time for instructors, professors and teachers to sort out all the implications and questions, of which there are many.
As for high school teachers, I stand firm. Let high school teachers have a year to learn more. I am a retired lifetime high school English teacher and department coordinator. I would need time to process not only what is known and what is not known, but also my own emotions and my classroom responsibilities.
But I am glad you wrote in with a comment that argues your points with clarity. I knew my point of view would be unacceptable to some people.
Sean – you list Poe, de Sade, Caravaggio, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Ezra Pound and Harvey Weinstein as artists we should study regardless of what we might judge to be their questionable character.
Very good point. I take it seriously.
My point is this: Except for Weinstein, they are in the past. We know what we know.
I argue that waiting one semester to process new information on Munro is appropriate. There are 150 stories. That is almost 5,000 pages. Many of these stories (if not all of them) are about guilt, relative guilt, atonement and relative atonement and are newly appropriate to Munro’s personal life. How can one review 150 stories in a month? If one is to understand what Munro was actually saying?
Understanding Munro is difficult. Understanding her take on guilt and atonement is difficult. Now it is even more difficult.
I am not arguing throw the baby out with the bath water. I am arguing – take a short pause to process.
Finally, Sean – you charge me with being childish. Have you read any of my work here? Other than this one essay?
Hey Betsy,
I think I technically said “childlike” as opposed to “childish,” and either way it’s a harsh thing to say, but I didn’t really know how else to say it and maintain my honesty. I just don’t think making a distinction between art and artist should be hard for a mature adult. I guess it’s the “we know what we know” comment of yours that feels “incomprehensible” to me, if that’s a better and less vicious-sounding or demeaning-sounding word than “childish” or “childlike” (again, my intent is not to demean at all, my intent is not to be vicious at all, just to disagree very, very strongly). Be it a high school teacher or a college professor, we’ll never truly “know” what happened in any of those cases. You can’t ever 100% “know” how much guilt or innocence any individual has. There could be evidence unearthed tomorrow about some hideous crime against children committed by Dickinson or Whitman or Keats, Beethoven or Mozart or Haydn, that we never knew about before. But why would that mandate pausing the instruction of their poems or symphonies? That’s my simple question.
The court of law and the court of public opinion are approximations. We never really “know” anything. We use the facts to learn little biographical details about famous people’s lives. OJ Simpson wasn’t convicted of murder, but very few people think he was not the murderer of two human beings. Does that make Simpson immoral and criminal, regardless of what any individual jury decided? I would say yes. But how does it benefit anyone to ignore OJ’s greatness as a football player, or to pull his plaque down from the Hall of Fame? He was a murderer AND a great football player. Munro and the other artists I mentioned were various levels of: immoral, bad, evil, flawed, problematic, selfish AND great at their job. Her stories are no better or worse because of any aspect of her personal life.
There is no “what Munro was actually saying,” there’s just the literature she created. Some readers will allow their personal biases or opinions about Munro’s biography and the allegations levied against her to matter, to infect or poison or influence their reading of her texts. Other readers just look at a text as a text. The intentional fallacy is defined as “(in literary criticism) a fallacy involving an assessment of a literary work based on the author’s intended meaning rather than on actual response to the work.” When we get so worked up over an individual artist’s personal behavior that we let it corrupt and compromise our logic, our judgment, our rational assessment of their text or canvas or sonata or sculpture or song or movie or short story or poem, that doesn’t seem like a reasonable adult response.
And yes, I’ve read other posts of yours on the site. Maybe it’s precisely BECAUSE they seemed so uniformly rational and adult/mature and this Munro response of yours so much less so that I argued so fervently.
Hi Sean,
Thank you for talking. Thanks for writing that you’ve read some of my other writing here. I apologize for misquoting you.
We are on opposite sides of an interesting argument.
(Not – should Munro be taught. Of course Munro should be taught. She had a miraculous gift that I still admire and still don’t fully understand. My gut feeling, though, is this is all too fresh for me to be able to teach her work in any coherent manner this fall.)
The interesting argument that divides us, I think, is this. I have always been interested in the life of the artist and how the life informs the work. My first two very serious term papers were on 1) DH Lawrence and 2) F Scott Fitzgerald. I read their biographies to see how their life was reflected in their work.
This is an approach that divides readers. I can appreciate that.
I can understand that some people (many people) want to deal with the art itself and only the art, which I sense is where you stand.
I couldn’t agree with you more that we will never really know the life of the artist.
When I say “we do not know yet what we do not know” I am not being fully honest. What I really mean by that is that I do not know yet what I do not know – not about ALice – but about myself.
I do not know yet how variously and intensely Andrea’s news is affecting me and my appraisal of any Munro story.
What I do know is that I am intensely affected by Andrea’s story.
If you are able to read Munro without being intensely affected by Andrea’s story, I recognize that. I cannot yet do that. And I do not know when that time will come.
I need time to settle. But due to how I read, I think I will always read Munro differently now. If you can keep Munro’s writing separate from Andrea’s story, good on you. To me. the stories that address guilt and atonement now read differently. More intensely. What is the message that Munro is working on? working out?
I am a woman. I have always been very interested in how Munro sees the lives of girls and women. I read for that – her philosophy.
But after Andrea’s article. tt will be a while before I will be calm enough to take a Munro story on its own. Which is why I would recommend waiting to teach Munro.
I know that because I was re-reading “Dimensions” the other day. This was published in the New Yorker 2 years after Fremlin’s arrest. It was difficult for me to separate this Munro exploration about guilt and atonement from Andrea’s story about guilt and Andrea’s implicit desire for atonement.
I do not mean we should not read “Dimensions.” I mean that right now I can hardly get through a paragraph in a rational manner.
You say:
“There could be evidence unearthed tomorrow about some hideous crime against children committed by Dickinson or Whitman or Keats, Beethoven or Mozart or Haydn, that we never knew about before. But why would that mandate pausing the instruction of their poems or symphonies? That’s my simple question.”
It’s not to censor the artist that I would pause. It would be to censor myself until the ability for rational thought on the art re-emerges.
I like your comment about OJ – as I am able to think about his art somewhat dispassionately because his art has nothing to do with words or philosophy. (Why do I mention philosophy? because I think Munro was interested in philosphy and interested in the philosophy of writing.) But I see your point more rationally thinking of OJ.
You also comment tellingly on the intentional fallacy:
“The intentional fallacy is defined as “(in literary criticism) a fallacy involving an assessment of a literary work based on the author’s intended meaning rather than on actual response to the work.”
I hear you. I think we are on opposite sides of another agument – that I read to see what the author is trying to convey and perhaps you read for how, not what, they are trying to convey.
Here’s my problem. I read like a woman reading another woman. I read Alice like she’s an aunt. I read her for what I learn about the lives of girls and women. She’s my Simone de Beauvoir. She tells me how it is at that particular point in time for that particular woman or set of women. Of course – my sense of her philosophy is defined by the limits of her writing and defined by the limits of my understanding.
I read her because she is usually not didactic. She is usually exploratory. What makes her a seer for women, in particular, is that she is not afraid to expore evry which way from sunday.
Right at the moment, I am so overwhelmed with Andrea’s staggering news that the limits of my understanding are defined as a purely emotional response. I am in no fit state to be able to attempt to see what Munro is saying at all. The limits on my rational powers are immense at the moment.
So yes – I read to see if I can the intended meaning of the story and I also read to simultaneously understand how I am doing that reading.
I read, as many women read ALice, not just for the way she writes but for what she sees. She even talks about that as a phase of writing – how one sees, how one gets to the truth = she talks about trance as a means. She is interested in really seeing as much as possible of what really happened. And given all the ellipses and gaps, she as much as admits – given all the ellipses, that seeing the truth entire is impossible. But some of her characters talk about searching for the truth.
So right now, reading ALice is difficult for me. I am not sure I trust her. I have to wait for all this to subside. I wouldn’t mind hearing more from Andrea herself – how she found her way, how she found rewarding work. I also would understand if Andrea never wanted to speak again. But of course, she might be mocking them. But my own response to that is – no – she’s not mocking them. She’s exploring how some people try to see the truth.
What is interesting to me, though, is how fiercely you feel that waiting a while for any individual teacher to dive in and teach Munro is censoring her. When to me it is censoring myself.
I meant – Alice could be mocking the women who think they want to see the truth. But I don’t think so. I do not that Alice is mocking them. Alice is exploring how people see the truth.
It is interesting that this has been Andrea’s search as well.
Very cogently argued, Betsy, and I can’t help but agree. It will be long time before I return to her work, mostly because I am left stunned and bewildered by these revelations. How can the author of Vandals, such a clear-eyed and empathetic examination of sexual abuse, display such willful naivety when the perpetrator is someone close to her? I’m also perplexed by her invocation of misogyny in her refusal to turn against her husband— again, how could this be the same person who explored feminist ideas with such grace and nuance in Meneseteung and the Albanian Virgin? These contradictions certainly make me view her work in a different light. Until recently, I regarded her as something of a sage, upon whom I could always depend for fresh insights into human relationships. Now, it seems more to me that her stories are private and inconclusive wranglings with various darknesses, from which she doesn’t quite escape unscathed. I’m therefore very interested in how these revelations will change how I interpret her work, but like I said, it will likely be a long time before I am able to do any kind of rereading.
I agree with Joe. Munro seemed so insightful and sensitive to nuance in relationships. That was her subject in most, if not all, of her stories. The revelation of egregious insensitivity, even cruelty, in her treatment of her daughter, the person most vulnerable to her, in my mind almost forces one to read her differently.
Joe mentions Vandals. That story seems to have been written after Andrea (finally! and as I said in the earlier post, it’s telling that her family, every one of them, were afraid to tell her about her 2d husband, until years after the fact) wrote to her about the abuse. The garden described in Vandals is Fremlin’s garden (as described in a 2004 NY Times portrait of Munro). I find that chilling. The story can be read as an apology to Andrea, an apology that apparently never came in life.
David Frum just posted an interesting piece in The Atlantic. He says he never liked Munro’s stories and he now believes that it’s because there was an emptiness, a dishonesty, at their core. (My paraphrase) I cite this because I always felt that her stories before the collection Open Secrets were, overall, better. I quibble as I write this because I have loved her work and she did write great later stories. And I know that literary critics discuss how complex and novelistic her stories became. I just responded more to The Beggar Maid, and The Ottawa Valley, for two. Frum’s piece reinforced my feeling that there was more heartfelt honesty in the earlier stories and a little more distance from her characters, a little less insight, in many of the later stories. To finish with a couple of examples: I liked the the title story of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. But, to me, you don’t feel the characters the way you do in many of the earlier stories. They are closer to “types,” than people. The three “Juliet” stories in Runaway, we now understand, have the gaping dishonesty at their core. Reading them years ago, I grieved for the bereft mother but I always felt that gap: what could have happened between that mother and daughter to cause the daughter to cut off contact. Now we know.
So well done, Ellen, to mention the Juliet stories. This is valuable.
Thank you for mentioning the David Frum piece in the Atlantic. An emptiness? a dishonesty? That is interesting. That is worth thinking about, although I do not know now where I will end up. What I have always noticed are the gaps. Which I now wonder about as secrets.
So much re-reading. So much re-thinking – for those of us who have been appreciative readers.
I will say, Ellen, that one of my take-aways is that graduate and undergraduate schools of creative writing now have to vigorously consider the writer’s right to secret self-defense.
Here is a quote from the David Frum commentary on Alice Munro:
“Many of [the stories] concern unspoken secrets, but the secrets and their aftermath never add up to much: They just sort of hang in the air over some small Canadian town, going nowhere and meaning little. Suddenly, the inconsequentiality of her narratives makes sense; shrugging off big news is how she treated her own most important lifelong secret, after all.”
(The Atlantic, August 18, 2024)
Two issues are here intertwined. (1) How do we respond, as individuals and society, when a prominent artist is discovered to be a person of immense moral failure? (2) How do we reevaluate the work of an artist whose moral standing has plummeted?
The answer for me to the first question is that we should metaphorically shun the artist. In the case of Alice Munro we can bin her books, rescind her Nobel Prize and other awards, dig up her eponymous public garden, and so on because she is now less of a person to be admired, feted and celebrated. In other words, we topple her statues. But these are statements we make about ourselves as much as about the moral failings of Alice Munro.
The second question is more interesting and more complex and involves the relationship between an artist and their work. An artwork has existence independent of its creator, but it is nonetheless forever associated with its creator. Alice Munro produced literary artworks that can be appreciated by a reader with no knowledge of the author, but they still carry her name and were formed from her experience and imagination.
Alice Munro is renowned for blending her own lived experience as a woman into her art and for exploring the universality of 20th century life in rural Ontario. And yet. Informed and accurate statistics on child sexual abuse and familial incest are generally hard to come by but we can be sure that they occur, perhaps not uncommonly, and that their effect on the victims can be unbearable. Munro includes hardship, sickness, violence, drunkenness, poverty, misogyny, death, sexuality and other things we prefer not to think about in her work, but few of her works address these two facets of (everyday?) life in the world she has created. I see this omission as an artistic failure because it diminishes the universality of her art and makes it shallower. Perhaps this is the essence of David Frum’s criticism.
Because of Andrea Robin Skinner’s bravery we know that Munro immured herself from, and that those close to her colluded in withholding, knowledge of Gerald Fremlin’s sexual abuse. We also knew that Munro was made aware of the abuse in a letter from Andrea in 1991. No matter how deeply she buried it, Munro knew of the abuse of her youngest daughter by her husband. Munro’s work is exemplary in its use of ambiguity and shifting narration. If we care to reevaluate Alice Munro’s art, we can explore whether or not the horrific sexual abuse of a 9 year old girl influences it, even ambiguously, and judge her artistry accordingly.
Philosopher – Thoughtfully and carefully said. Thank you for that. This sentence from you is interesting:
“In other words, we topple her statues. But these are statements we make about ourselves as much as about the moral failings of Alice Munro.”
The thing that stands out for me is how long it is taking me to process Andrea’s news.
For one thing, I know there are stories I need to re-read: Vandals, Dimensions, and the Juliet stories. And others.
But I am not ready. I have too much dust to settle. Couldn’t possibly, for instance, teach Munro myself right now, as I am processing one question after another.
Betsy, I think, based on my memory of a number of her stories (I, like you, am not ready to reread her now) and on what we now know of Fremlin’s abuse of Andrea, that Fremlin was, in general, a controlling and abusive man, psychologically, if not also physically. And that Alice, certainly once she married him, was increasingly under his control–psychologically and emotionally. That is not to excuse her abhorrent behavior. But it is part of the dynamic, I think.
To cite a few additional stories as clues: Friend of my Youth, the title story, and Differently, which, to me, oozes the regret of the protagonist. Meneseteung: the mistake almost made. These stories were written before Andrea’s letter. The title story of Open Secrets, think of the older lawyer, “Maureen’s” husband. Jumping ahead to Runaway: the title story: like Alice, the wife in that story tries to run away, but returns to her controlling and abusive husband. And, of course, control goes hand-in-hand with, at least, some abuse. What struck me years ago in the Juliet stories, besides the daughter severing all ties, was the salutation in the letter that is quoted in concluding the middle story Soon: “Dreaded (Dearest) Eric. Juliet is writing to the husband she supposedly loves. So “Dreaded.”???
I will be interested in your thoughts, Betsy and those of the other commenters.
Ellen – If Munro is processing her own marriage in these stories – well – dumbstruck me – I had not gotten that far in my own processing. But immediately, reading your note, one word – one of Munro’s favorite ideas – floats: “submission.” There’s a book in that one word and her stories. And now Andrea’s. I have always noted it – its strangeness. Submission is a strange word for a feminist to use as a central idea.
There is thrill usually associated where the word appears in her stories with the idea of submission – that it would be a very special thing for an independent woman to want to “submit.” He would have to be quite a guy. I know I have written about it here. But it’s dawn and the day beckons . . .
Looking back at a draft of the essay I wrote about the story “Runaway” I see I used the word “submission” four times to assess what was going on in the story. it will take more time than I have today to search where ALice used submit or submission herself. But I know she did.
I am reminded of this fact. Fremlin threatened, in writing, to kill Andrea if she went forward with any of her story. In all the commentary available in reaction to Andrea’s July 7 story in the Star, this is a fact no one wants to touch with a ten foot pole. I note this because it was for me one of the central facts.
Threatened to kill Andrea. And who else? How stupid. It didn’t occur to me at the time he was threatening anyone but Andrea. I was subsumed with the fear I had for Andrea. But obviously. He was threatening anyone who got in his way.
Ellen – you say – “based on my memory of a number of her stories (I, like you, am not ready to reread her now) and on what we now know of Fremlin’s abuse of Andrea, that Fremlin was, in general, a controlling and abusive man, psychologically, if not also physically. ” In general. Seems like.
One of the questions that has dogged me these past two months has to do with Munro’s biographer. Who did she sanction to write her biography? Yes, I know that Robert Thacker (“Writing Her Lives”) was her “biographer.” Are we to imagine that he is the only one at work on the definitive biography? He, the guy who covered up what he knew? He, the cover-up artist?
Was there another biographer?
Betsy, the more it has sat in my head, the more I became sure that Fremlin was controlling. Is it possible for a person to be controlling, but not abusive, at least psychologically, to the person controlled. You have added “evidence,” I hadn’t thought of. Being controlled, therefore submitting, is, for some women, seductive, thrilling as you said. It seems it was to Alice. Maybe only at first, and then she also felt trapped. But being controlled is also being a focus of attention. That focus is also seductive. Thrilled, seduced, and trapped, like some of her protagonists.
I, also, hadn’t focused on Fremlin’s threat to kill Andrea. Whether or not he threatened Alice’s life as well, his threat to her daughter’s life is abusive enough. In the end though, Andrea took him to court and he didn’t kill her. He did, despicably, accuse her, at 9, of being the temptress.
I read, though, that Andrea finally broke with her mother for good when she became pregnant. She, understandably, did not want Fremlin near her children. Alice said that it would be “inconvenient” to visit without Fremlin, especially because she didn’t drive. She also said that she loved Fremlin too much to leave him. In the 2004 NY Times profile Alice calls Fremlin “the love of her life.” Yet, it always struck me that Munro did not write of marriage as a happy state. In many of her stories, escaping marriage brought greater happiness, or, at least, contentment.
The unpublished, maybe as yet unwritten, unvarnished and thorough biography of Munro will be an interesting read. It would probably have to be unsanctioned to really be truthful.
On the copyright page of my edition of “Lives of Girls and Women” is this statement from Alice Munro:
“This novel is autobiographical in form but not in fact. My family, neighbors and friends did not serve as models.”
I find this unusual statement riveting and unnerving. Why is it here? What is the history of such statements by writers? What is the history of publishers insisting on writers making these statements? Munro herself is publicly and cynically lying given that she repeatedly used family in her work, and one would deduce – probably neighbors and friends as well.
There’s a book here, as Robert Thacker clearly knew. I find the statement unnerving and chilling
Why would she assert something that is clearly untrue?
Money? Ambition? Fame? Submission? A belief that the artist is above ordinary morality as the artist is conducting a necessary exploration in morality and philosphy?
Departments of Creative Writing need to address this question. An entire course could be taught, indeed should be taught, on the ethical or moral issues involved in the decision by writers to use their family, friends, and neighbors as “material.”
Munro used her own daughter – Andrea Skinner – as “material.” I could easily argue that this decision caused her daughter irreparable pain and sorrow, given the secrecy imposed on the whole extended “family” and given the extreme seriousness of the “material.”
In 1992, Andrea informed her mother that Gerald Fremlin (Munro’s husband) had sexually abused her at age nine and after. Munro at first ran from her husband and then returned. But consider that in the meantime, Fremlin threatened to kill Andrea if she went public. The whole family maintained radio silence on the issue that they all knew about Fremlin’s pedophilia and the family coverup until about 30 years later.
In 1993, Munro published “Vandals,” a story about a man’s pedophilia and his partner’s silent consent. The story reads as a horror story when you realize that Andrea could have read the story and was most likely intended to read the story. “Vandals” also reads as a horror story when you realize that Munro was intentionally but secretly making the reader complicit.
I would argue that Munro has used her writing as a secret defense of her own behavior and her husband’s behavior, and that such secrecy is and was undefensible. The secrecy within which Munro operated and mandated caused even greater harm after the fact. Harm was imposed on her family, friends, neighbors, colleagues and readers.
Do not assume me a puritannical reader. Of course writers get material from family, friends and neighbors. The question is how this material is used. The question remains – are there situations when the use of such “material” is inexcusable? I deeply believe that departments of Creative Writing have an urgent responsibility to investigate in what situations writers are legitimate or illegimate in using their family, friends and neighbors as “material.”