Re-reading Alice Munro in the light of the secrets she kept and pain she caused

This week, Canadians heard about the enormity of Andrea Skinner’s suffering, following sexual abuse by her stepfather, and her mother Alice Munro’s decision to stay with and protect him .

Following this, I, like so many readers around the world, am feeling a profound sense of shock and loss. For much of my life, Munro’s stories have been a solace. As an introverted pre-teen, I felt seen by Lives of Girls and Women . Long before I learned to admire and study Munro’s technical mastery, I was grateful for the wisdom with which she wrote about girlhood.

As the stories about Munro shift and gather darkness, so, too, do the stories she authored. For me as a literature scholar, the question is not should we return to them, but how will we read them now?

As scholars re-read Munro with a knowledge of the secrets she kept and the pain she caused, we have an opportunity — if not an obligation — to use our re-readings to reckon with sexual abuse of children and the silence that so often surrounds it.

Read more: The Gothic horror of Alice Munro: A reckoning with the darkness behind a feminist icon

‘Lives of Girls and Women’

As culture writer Constance Grady argues, in the wake of so many recent public disclosures of great artists who have done terrible things, it feels naive to be shocked that Munro wrought such pain . It’s also humbling to recognize I’m shocked because I held her to a higher standard than other artists — because she is a woman who writes about the lives of women, because I, as a feminist, may have idealized her, and because I as a white woman found reading Munro to be such an intimate experience.

Part way through Lives , its protagonist, Dell, gives up the novel she is writing and commits herself to detailing “the dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable lives” of people in her town, describing “every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, … every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together — radiant, everlasting.”

When Munro died in May, this passage was invoked as an authorial manifesto. But two months later, Munro’s legacy looks very different, and so does her work. A new darkness suffuses the stories, colouring our understanding of their preoccupation with shame and the careful sustenance of secrets.

As poet and novelist Zoe Whittall writes, “Munro’s focus on these things "now seems less inspirational and more monstrous.” But she argues, “ we can and should hold this complexity ” while returning to stories that bolster our understanding of abuse and its afterlife.

If we are attentive and thoughtful, Whittall suggests, when we hear horrifying truths about Munro’s behaviour, and revisit worlds Munro revealed in her work, “stories like these can help us change the way we talk about familial reaction[s] to abuse.”

Questions about biography, culpability

I hope that’s true, but I’m wrestling with how to “hold” and handle this complexity. As a teacher, I spent 25 years prodding students to move beyond narrowly biographical readings anchored by the facts of a writer’s life.

But that is changing: while the rise of social media makes such readings more available, the advent of the #MeToo movement and the associated scandal surrounding writers such as Junot Diaz and Neil Gaiman has made questions about biography and personal culpability more urgent. This week, they feel unavoidable and necessary.

After reading Skinner’s story in the Toronto Star , I returned to Open Secrets , published less than two years after Skinner wrote a letter to her mother revealing the abuse, and I re-read the final story, “Vandals.” It’s about Bea, a woman who knew, but did not admit, that her partner, Ladner, was a pedophile; it’s also about their neighbour’s daughter, Liza, who Ladner sexually abused.

I also re-read a scholarly article I’d published on “Vandals” and felt embarrassed by my cool appraisal of Munro’s subtle rendering of child sexuality.

In earlier readings I was taken with Munro’s use of taxidermy — its manipulation of bodies and its invitation to suspend disbelief — as a motif for the silence surrounding sexual violence in the story. But now awful biographical connections on every page stand out.

In retrospect, my comments look naïve and detached. And so, like literary scholars across the country, I am thinking about how to teach and write about Munro’s work, and asking what her cowardice and cruelty mean for her legacy.

Reckoning with the cost of silence

Munro’s children have been clear that their silence, their father’s silence and that of people who knew the family, was maintained to protect Munro’s reputation. So, it seems important that Munro’s legacy include a fulsome reckoning with the enormous cost of such silence alongside a reckoning with the complex ways that silence is manifested and mined in her work.

Munro described Open Secrets as an attempt to “challenge what people want to know” and “to record how women adapt to protect men .” Re-reading “Vandals” now, I read it as being about the culpability of a woman who, as Liza says, “could spread safety,” but doesn’t.

It starts with a letter that Bea begins to write — but never sends — to Liza, and it ends with Liza and her boyfriend trashing the home Bea shared with Ladner. The boyfriend asks Liza, “What did they do that made you so mad?” After a time, Liza says, “I already told you what she did to me. She sent me to college!”

The invitation to think about what Bea didn’t do for Liza was always clear, but Liza’s focus on Bea now resonates differently, attuning us to damage done by the woman who “made a bargain not to remember” horrific things. But, if, as has been suggested, the story now reads like an allegory and an apology, it is all the more disturbing for the knowledge that Munro never apologized to her daughter, that she blamed her, and protected her daughter’s abuser.

Failure to ‘spread safety’

“Vandals” ends with a description of dusk as “darkness collecting.” Years ago, I wrote that darkness owed much to the ways Munro renders the pedophile “more fearful for his lack of monstrosity,” his “very ordinariness.” That’s still true, but now I see it also has everything to do with Bea’s failure — and her author’s failure — to “spread safety.”

Skinner wrote, “I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.” Instead, she wants the fact of her suffering to “become part of the stories people tell about my mother.”

Those of us who teach or write about Munro’s stories, need to think about how to use our work to “spread safety” in the lives of girls and women, including through confronting complicity with harms. For me that starts with foregoing the careful distance of academic scholarship that confidently takes a text on its own terms. It means being willing to stumble in the darkness.

Carrie Dawson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.