TORONTO — When she became the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in literature, the Toronto Star boasted “Alice Munro is ours.” Munro, a master of the short story, appeared on Canadian postage stamps, was celebrated with monuments, had a library and garden named in her honor.
But now, after revelations that Munro stayed with her husband after learning he had sexually abused her daughter, Canadians are reassessing that legacy.
Professors are wrestling with how to teach Munro’s work. Bookstores are debating whether to feature it on their shelves. And Canadians are grappling with the age-old question: Is it possible to divorce the art from the artist?
Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro’s youngest daughter, shocked Canadians on Sunday with an essay in the Star, the country’s largest newspaper, in which she wrote that Munro’s second husband — Skinner’s stepfather — had sexually abused her starting in 1976, when she was 9.
Skinner told Munro 16 years later, she wrote. Gerald Fremlin, the stepfather, admitted the abuse in graphic letters and pleaded guilty to indecent assault in 2005. Nonetheless, Munro stayed with him until his death, in 2013.
Marsha Lederman, a columnist for the Globe and Mail, called the revelations “a swirling betrayal” that necessitate a reappraisal of Munro’s legacy. Reading them, the novelist Stephen Marche wrote in the Star, was “like being punched repeatedly in the solar plexus.”
Ellyn Winters, a marketer and writer in Ontario’s Waterloo region, saw Munro as part of “the Canadian fabric.” Winters admires Munro’s work for the way it captures life in small town Canada. But now, she said, the writer’s reputation is “tarnished.”
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“Unfortunately, we’re all flawed human beings, and what has come out is reprehensible,” Winters told The Washington Post. “The thought that a mother would betray a daughter in that way just makes me sick to my stomach.”
Still, she said, she would not want to see Munro’s work scratched off syllabi or pulled from stores. “We have to lift up the rock and look at the ugly things underneath sometimes,” Winters said. “I think there’s a real opportunity for a very healthy dialogue versus just scratching her out of history.”
When Skinner told Munro of the abuse, she wrote, her mother reacted not with concern or support, but “as if she had learned of an infidelity.” Munro told Skinner “about other children Fremlin had ‘friendships’ with,” Skinner wrote, and emphasized “her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed.”
Also troubling has been the acknowledgment that many, including a Munro biographer, knew about the abuse and Munro’s decision to stay with Fremlin — and kept it secret, too. Skinner’s stepmother said journalists asked her at parties if it was true.
“Andrea Skinner’s memoir amounts to a national horror story,” Marche wrote in the Star, “a specifically Canadian conspiracy of silence, and evidence of a national pathology: It reveals so much of our desire not to tell stories[.]”
With the silence on the abuse now lifted, the question of what to do about it is fraught.
The Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story, held annually in the writer’s native Huron County, Ontario, has expressed its “unequivocal support” of Skinner as it weighs how the revelations will impact programming. Western University, where Munro was a student and later writer-in-residence and which now hosts an Alice Munro Chair in Creativity, said it’s considering “Munro’s legacy and her ties to Western.”
In her birthplace of Wingham, Ontario, a representative of the Alice Munro library declined to comment on how it’s dealing with the revelations. The mayor of Central Huron, Ontario, the municipality where she lived much of her life, told the Canadian Press he’d “consider” amending a monument to Munro if there were public outcry.
Joée Dufresne is a bookseller at L’Euguélionne, a self-described feminist bookstore in Montreal. She said that she and other members of the co-op have not yet made a final decision, but are leaning toward pulling Munro’s work from its shelves.
Amid public controversy, Dufresne said, there “can be a pressure to go to the knee-jerk reaction.” She’s “really wary,” she said, “of a black-and-white kind of cancel-culture mind-set when situations are often complex.”
But Munro’s complicity in her child’s abuse and refusal to take responsibility for it, she said, had the effect of upholding a patriarchal system and contributing to a culture of silence around sexual violence that’s one reason it remains endemic.
“Being a feminist bookstore and taking sexual violence seriously, there’s no lack of authors whose work we can put on our shelves,” Dufresne said. “I’m sure that her books will be available in many places still, but we want our bookstore to send a message to victims of sexual violence that we care.”
Manina Jones, chair of the English department at Western University, is grappling with how to teach Munro’s work. Survivors of sexual abuse will “no doubt” be among her students, she said, and she wants to approach the topic “responsibly and with sensitivity.”
“I don’t believe in literary icons, but I am an admirer of Munro’s fiction,” Jones wrote in an email to The Post. “I won’t be able to read her works in the same way again. I will bring to them a heightened sense of the ways the dark complexities of everyday human experiences so acutely portrayed in her stories have made themselves felt in Munro’s family life in the harm she and her husband and the others who silenced and ignored Andrea Skinner did.”
Robert Lecker, an English professor at McGill University, has always included Munro’s works on his syllabi. He taught an undergraduate course on the writer last year and plans to teach a graduate-level seminar this winter.
Skinner’s account, he said, was a “complete surprise.”
“It shocked me,” Lecker said. “I find it inexplicable. I just can’t fathom it.”
The revelations will change “enormously” how he approaches her work. He plans to engage the students in discussions about “how do we separate the artist from the works produced by the artist, how deep is that separation and how much are the characters in a story … one in the same as their creator.”
He pointed to a passage in Munro’s 1971 coming-of-age novel “Lives of Girls and Women,” in which the narrator, Del Jordan, says “People’s lives … were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable — deep caves with kitchen linoleum.”
“We look at the surface and we see the regular old, worn linoleum on the floor, but beneath that linoleum, that innocent-looking, everyday linoleum, are those deep caves that we’re invited to explore,” Lecker said. “I think, in fact, the controversy that’s going on right now is that we seem to have entered one of those deep caves that was lying under the linoleum and we don’t quite know where to go or how to find our way.”
