On despoiling – Anne Enright in NYRB:

‘In July, two months after Alice Munro died, her daughter Andrea Skinner revealed not only that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather for several years starting when she was nine but that when confronted with this truth sixteen years later her mother “chose to stay with, and protect [her] abuser,” Gerald Fremlin. Andrea said that she wanted these facts to “become part of the stories people tell about my mother.” It might also be said that they were part of the stories her mother had given to the world.
As with many revelations, all this realigns what we already knew about Munro’s life in a way that makes more sense. It also throws a sharp light on Munro’s later fiction, throughout which elements of Andrea’s experience, and all that came after it, can be found. Some people may choose not to read the later stories: they may find it egregious that Munro both dismissed the damage done to her daughter and used it to fuel her work. Yet the tug of this long-kept secret is there on the page and, as with many unpleasant discoveries, once you see it, you find it everywhere.’

(…)

‘In 1992, when she was twenty-five, Andrea sent her mother a slightly apologetic letter telling her what had happened to her as a child, and Alice immediately left her husband. She set the letter on the table for Fremlin to find and flew to a second home in Comox on the west coast. “It was chaos and mayhem and hysterical actions all around,” according to Jenny. “But the focus was not on Andrea.”’

(…)

‘Looking back at her interviews, you find that Munro was always succinct and never a liar. She meant what she said, if the reader had wit enough to hear it. When Open Secrets came out in 1994, two years after her brief escape to Comox, Munro said she wanted “to record how women adapt to protect men.” In this collection, “the emotional pull is the strength of denial. Women have been pulled in half this way for a long time.” She also said that the stories “aren’t about what they seem to be about.” Munro wanted to keep them open—perhaps this was the pun in the title—and knew people might find this disconcerting: “I wanted to challenge what people want to know. Or expect to know. Or anticipate knowing. And as profoundly, what I think I know.”’

(…)

‘There is much adultery in her work, and though her women are, from the earliest stories, exploited and abandoned by the men they desire, for the reader this erotic energy feels honest and liberating.
In the story of her writing life, the relationship with Gerald Fremlin was styled as a serendipitous return to Huron County. They knew each other at university; decades later he heard her on the radio and got in touch; they met, had three martinis each, and a year later Munro found herself settling just thirty-five kilometers from her childhood home. She was forty-five, writing brilliantly, and her work thrived on a sense of place. Fremlin was a geographer and a keen local historian, so their trips around the countryside provided rich material for her stories.’

(…)

‘Munro was ambivalent about motherhood. Married at twenty, she had three pregnancies over the next six years, and one child who died soon after birth. Although she nursed all her surviving babies, Alice told Sheila that she had been an “emotionally tight” mother who did not touch or hold her much as a toddler but that, after the tragic loss of the infant Catherine, she was more affectionate with Jenny. She also confided that Andrea, born when Jenny was nine, had been conceived because the contraception failed. Eight months into this surprise pregnancy, Jim moved the family to a big house that Alice did not want. The needs of a new baby exhausted her, and “the marriage never regained anything after that.” Looking after Andrea was a problem during their protracted separation. Alice made great efforts to be with her in Victoria and to bring her to Ontario, which was more than four days away by train. In 1974, at the age of eight, Andrea was enrolled in a school in Ontario. “I’m terribly grateful that I had them,” Munro said of her children, when her third book was published that year. “Yet, I have to realize, I probably wouldn’t have had them if I had the choice.” The next summer she moved in with Fremlin and helped to look after his mother, while Andrea moved back across the country to live with Jim Munro during the school year.’

(…)

‘“She wasn’t the utter joy of my life she might have been,” she said of Sheila, in a 2004 profile by Daphne Merkin in The New York Times Magazine. “I was emotionally more open to the second.” She does not discuss Andrea, and there is much talk of Gerald Fremlin, whom Munro—“her eyes ablaze with romantic mischief”—says she immediately fell for when she met him in college. Merkin styles the relationship as part of a love triangle, though in fact Alice was not yet dating Jim Munro when she first met Fremlin. Indeed, the overlap in Munro’s interest in these two men has never been made clear: When I ask whether she would have gone off with Fremlin then and there, she says, simply and unhesitatingly, “Yes,” and for a moment I see the character of Pauline in her, the adulterous wife and mother in her 1997 story “The Children Stay,” who decides to bag an existence of “married complicity” to run off with her lover.’

(…)

‘The woman in “The Children Stay” (1997), who loses custody of her children as the price for an affair, is like a distillation of all Munro’s escapees. “She was becoming one of those people who ran away. A woman who shockingly and incomprehensibly gave everything up. For love, observers would say wryly. Meaning, for sex.” But though her maternal pangs are strong (“And still, what pain”), the consequences turn out to be more imagined than real. In a final flash-forward we hear: Her children have grown up. They don’t hate her. For going away or staying away. They don’t forgive her either. Perhaps they wouldn’t have forgiven her anyway, but it would have been for something different.’

(…)

‘In 2002, when Andrea refused to see Fremlin or let him come near her children, Alice reminded her daughter how inconvenient it would be for her to visit her grandchildren without him, as she could not drive. Journalists complained that it took more than three hours to get to Clinton from Toronto. Fremlin dropped her off for interviews one town over, and he picked her up again, immediately asking, in 2004, how much she’d had to drink. According to Margaret Atwood, Munro “wasn’t very adept at real life.” Sheila described her mother as so lacking in manual dexterity that she could not take a photograph, and said she always removed her sunglasses before crossing the street, “as if she did not quite trust herself in the physical world.”’

(…)

‘For both Del and Jesse, things happen because they have imagined them happening, though the reality will feel wrong and dissociating. The terrible power these girls think they possess undoes consent while giving them an appalling, magical agency. It is almost as though they were in charge of their own despoiling.’

(…)

‘I have read Munro all my life, and reading her again in light of these revelations, I find that I cannot take back my great love for her work; it was too freely given.
Jenny Munro described her mother as “a dedicated, cold-eyed storyteller” and said: “Whether people love her fiction or hate it doesn’t matter. Andrea’s truth is here to stay.”’

Read the article here.

Once you see it, you find it everywhere.

Probably most revelations should not take back great love for books, movies or paintings. You love the book, not the writer, even though confusion is part of the love often.

The fear that your thoughts might be powerful, might be too powerful, that you can kill or harm others, has been known to many children.

Lacking dexterity, but a cold-eyed storyteller. You have to make up for the lack of manual dexterity.