Reckoning With Alice Munro’s Darkest Secret

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a mother has her child’s best interests at heart, and that she will put those interests before her own. Nature has made this a necessity: Without constant care and solicitude, an infant will die. If mothers don’t protect their children, who will? How will the they survive? This is baked into us: Regardless of our feminist beliefs, we expect women to be good mothers.

So when we learn that Alice Munro—who so brilliantly chronicled the lives of girls and women, who described in such knowing detail their secret thoughts, their pain and yearning, needs and desires—played a part in a story of childhood abuse, it shakes the foundations of our belief in—what? Her writing? Her role as a model? The maternal archetype? Whatever it shakes, it does so profoundly. For it had seemed that Munro understood everything about us, the way we thought and felt, in public and private.

How is it possible that she did not understand this fundamental female thing about what a mother is?

Sexuality, and the seamy physical side of life-the shadowy, hot, shameful, unspoken part-has always been a compelling element in Munro’s writing. Those passages were both discomfiting and electrifying. Yes, we thought, these are real, these awful encounters; here is the anti-romantic aspect of sex. We stared at them in horrid fascination, safe with the author, at a distance. But now we see these stories in a different light. Now we can’t help but wonder how they relate to the fact that Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, was covertly abusing Munro’s young daughter Andrea, and that a horrifying story of sexual predation was unfolding around Munro herself. Was she somehow aware of it? Did she keep herself from knowing? Did she stay silent and complicit as it happened, protecting her husband at the expense of her child?

Munro wasn’t told by her daughter about the abuse until 20 years after it happened. By that time any response would be retroactive: nothing Munro did could prevent it from having happened. Her daughter no longer lived with her. Her husband did. When her daughter told her, Munro chose to give precedence to her husband, protecting him. She lashed out at her daughter, blaming a misogynistic society for what had happened. She did not blame her husband for his acts.

Munro’s response is not unique. In fact, the troubling narrative of sexual abuse is played out in many families as a dark unspoken story. Silence and complicity are essential, and the family dynamic becomes a taut cat’s cradle of tension. The mother is often involved, denying reality and protecting her partner. Denial, too, is essential to survival. There are many accounts of women who deny the truth about their partners: battered wives, who return to their brutal husbands. Mothers of abused children, who collude through silence. Boyfriends and stepfathers, men with no biological connection to the child, seem to figure more frequently than fathers in these stories. The women are caught between the two: partner and child. In 2007, an Oklahoman woman was famously found guilty of second-degree murder by not aiding her three-year-old daughter as she lay dying, after being murderously abused by her stepfather. These are women who live in fearful thrall to their abusive partners.

Read More: Literary World Grapples With Alice Munro’s Legacy After Daughter’s Revelation of Abuse

The revelations about Munro’s private life brings into electrifying focus the grim and threatening men in her work. The chillingly cold doctor in Amundsen; the frightening man running the riding stable, in Runaway; the sadistic and pedophilic taxidermist, in Vandals. These men create currents of hostility and cruelty. The women held captive by them are made helpless by deep primal bonds of fear and obedience. These women believe they cannot survive without these men, they have a degrading need for that brutal presence.

When we first read those stories about women who could not break free, we believed that Munro understood them because she was wiser than they. We thought she understood, from a compassionate distance, the awful dynamic that destabilized their lives. But now the stories take on a new shape. Perhaps Munro was writing from another place altogether, a place of much more intimate knowledge of these bonds. Perhaps she knew, herself, what it was to be held in that shameful thrall, unable to leave an abusive partner, even when his behavior undermined the foundations of her own world. The story in which a daughter withdraws from her mother for reasons never articulated, in which the mother must spend the rest of her life in the dreadful shadow of her daughter’s absence–that, too, is now seen in a new light.

What Fremlin did was unconsionable.

He was the center of Munro’s world.

She could not reconcile the two facts.

To hear about the hideous reality of her husband’s behavior would be like hearing that the air she breathed was poison. If this were true, the life she knew was over. If she could make it not true, her life could continue. Like many women, Munro chose the latter path. She denied his actions and her failures. Of  course her abuser would welcome that response: Fremlin was Alice’s abuser as well as Andrea’s. He lied and dissembled to them both, he bullied and manipulated them both. Like the loathsome taxidermist, he created his own monstrous world and made them live in it.

Munro wrote brilliantly about women in deep thrall to men who were cold, frightening, and manipulative. Now, with a turn of the kaleidoscope, these stories reveal a new pattern. The stories are still brilliant, but the writer is no longer the woman we believed her to be. We thought her brave and independent, intrepid in her approach to men and to life. Now we see her frozen by fear, trapped by a destructive and abusive relationship, unable to see beyond it, like those characters we so pitied. Now we see her as driven by delusion and passion, just as they were. We see her destroying parts of her own life, as they did.

The strength of Munro’s work is in setting down truths about women that no-one else had told: about their power and their vulnerability, and the way they act, driven by passion and by determination. She has revealed a kind of deep emotional knowledge about women that no one else had mined. Because of this deep knowledge, it was easy to see her as a kind of sybil, wise and compassionate, possessed of an understanding beyond our own.

The story of Fremlin and her daughter has changed all that. It hasn’t changed Munro’s work, but it changes the way we see the author.

Munro now stands before us like one of her characters, her deepest, most shameful flaws revealed. We knew her strengths: what will we do now with her weaknesses? How are we to reconcile the person with the work? We can condemn her acts while understanding why they were committed: Munro herself was caught in grip of a predator and abuser. She could not summon the courage to stand up to him, not even to protect her daughter. We may grieve over this failure and the damage done to her daughter.

But we may still recognize the power of her work: it is like poetry written on the walls of a prison cell, a voice bearing witness to a woman’s life.