Alice Munro Was Hiding in Plain Sight
I know the Nobel laureate’s writing by heart. I know her failures by heart, too.
This story I’m about to tell you is true, and it is not in dispute. Alice Munro was a beloved writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the apex of a long career already bent under the weight of its laurels. She died six weeks ago, after a long, degenerative illness, which sometimes reporters called dementia and sometimes they called Alzheimer’s.
It doesn’t matter what illness it was. What matters is that in the decadelong silence that ended Alice’s career, she had become only more beloved. “Our Chekhov,” yes, but one crossed with Marilla Cuthbert or Marmee or any of the other beloved mothers of sentimental fiction. In her last photographs, Alice looked soft, her hair floating white, her skin like cotton fabric washed many times over. The world piled praise on her grave like roses. The whole thing felt so safe.
Then, yesterday, her daughter Andrea wrote in the Toronto Star that Gerald Fremlin, Alice’s second husband, had sexually abused her as a child, that he had not just admitted to it but admitted to it in writing, calling himself “a Humbert Humbert” as though that excused it, and that when confronted with all of this many years later, Alice only briefly left the stepfather and then returned to him.
Andrea says her mother explained “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.” After that, Andrea tried to maintain a relationship with Alice, but it proved too difficult to live in such denial. When Andrea went to the police at last in 2005, the stepfather pleaded guilty to indecent assault on a minor. Still, Alice remained with him until his death in 2013. Andrea didn’t speak to her or her siblings for years afterward. Even then, she was able to tell her story only after her mother’s death. She had to wait the better part of her life for the world to listen.
Andrea’s stepmother, the only responsible adult in this scenario, is still alive and told the Toronto Star that “everyone knew” about Alice’s horrible choice to stay with her daughter’s abuser. She says, in fact, that she was asked about it at dinner parties, including by a journalist.
Of course, everyone didn’t know. I didn’t know, and in a world where nearly every reading person, Canadian or not, claims some affinity for Alice, I thought of my claim to “know” her as stronger than most. My roots are in the Ottawa Valley, a place so close to where Alice grew up, and frequently wrote about, that one of her more famous stories is called “The Ottawa Valley.” People often wrote of Alice finding the universal in the specific — well, she found the universal in what often felt like my specific, the white, Protestant, “quiet” rural life my family came from.
Yet I am not surprised by any of this. I am upset, but my disquiet is laced with a recognition that families do not react to abuse the way they do in the movies. They do not unconditionally support victims, even when the abusers don’t dispute what happened. They do something more self-protective and sacrifice the person who has disturbed the quiet of the family.
There is a recognition of the general fact that the “everyone” who “knows” secrets like this one often includes powerful people who could have blown a whistle but didn’t; the Andreas of the world pay the price, and that’s just what it is.
But there is also a recognition of the more specific situation. That the Ottawa Valley (and Southern Ontario more generally), well, it’s just “like this.” In my family, there are secrets and lies too, and, like Andrea, I was taught that the most important thing was not to talk about them. Even now — I am in my 40s — I feel uneasy typing that sentence because it explicitly admits that there are secrets and lies in my family and that this, above all, my parents don’t want people to know. They don’t even want me to know the contours of some of them. I have only guesses in some cases. I have only the feeling of sadness around the edges of certain events, a sadness that is older than I and rooted in the motives of adults who never once explained themselves to me.
But enough about me. Back to Alice.
The other kind of recognition I felt learning this news was of fragments from Alice’s writing. All the stories, every last one, are about secrets the people in them keep because they are constrained by personality or, more often, by their “quiet” social order from expressing any kind of inner life. Some of those fragments sound so different now.
There is the closing line of what I believe was the last bit of writing Alice ever published, “Dear Life”: “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do — we do it all the time.” The story is about Alice’s mother, who died of Parkinson’s disease. What else was it about?
In “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” an unfaithful husband must deal with the loss of his wife to Alzheimer’s and, eventually, to another man, whom in her dementia she believes to be the truly great love of her life. The husband married this wife, the story tells us, because “He wanted never to be away from her.” Sarah Polley, in her 2006 film adaptation, took this as its title, Away From Her. The story is usually taken as romantic, about someone realizing too late that they have squandered what they have. Now, it feels like something else.
Then there is a story I immediately thought of when the news broke yesterday: “Vandals,” published in The New Yorker in 1993, shortly after Andrea sent a letter to her mother outlining what had happened to her and shortly after Alice left the stepfather, then returned, and clearly hoped in a delusional way that this would all blow over.
In the story, a woman named Bea asks a much younger woman named Liza to check on her house while Bea is at the hospital with her husband. Liza goes to the house and trashes it, and in the context of the story, this at first seems so random that it catches you off guard. Then you come to understand that Liza was abused by Bea’s husband in childhood and that when she looks at the house and the yard, she sees “a bruise on the ground, a tickling and shame in the grass.”
Bea knows about the bruise. That much the story does make clear. “Bea could spread safety if she wanted,” Alice wrote. But to do so, she would need “to turn herself into a different sort of woman, a hard-and-fast, draw-the-line sort, clean-sweeping, energetic, and intolerant.” This, Bea is not able to do. This, Alice was not able to do.
I’ve been calling her Alice this whole piece, at the risk of irritating you, because it feels like if I call her Munro, I am referring to the Nobel winner, the public self she cultivated, what David Foster Wallace once called “the Statue.” Every writer who captures even a sliver of the public’s attention has something like this they have to wrestle with: the way the public feels about them versus the way they actually are.
There will be talk of whether Alice’s statue should remain up, metaphorically, in the face of all this. I think it can — what I’ve been trying to tell you is I think I know these stories better now than I did before because of this revelation. Readers sometimes still revert to children when talking about the writers they love. I suppose it’s natural. Children, after all, presume adults know what they are doing. They presume adults are doing the best they can. But adults are not always doing the best they can, not even the ones who seem so obviously to be doing so. It’s uncomfortable. It’s terrible. It’s very sad. And it’s something we just have to process, endlessly, every day, for the rest of our lives.
And do you know who taught me that? First, it was the Ottawa Valley.
Then, it was Alice.
Now, it’s Andrea.
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