Struggling with tarnished hero’s legacy

Opinion

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This article was published 16/07/2024 (437 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Alice Munro was once my literary hero.

I’d been voraciously reading her short stories since the mid ’90s, but none more so than when I was going through my season of divorce in the early aughts. I devoured her every word in the collections The Love of a Good Woman and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, hoping to find some revelatory information about the human condition and, more precisely, the mysteries of marriage.

I read, not just for an understanding of universal themes, but also for hope. I believed that if the women in Alice Munro’s stories could survive their brokenness and family dysfunction, then maybe I could, too. Funny thing, as I look back now, what I was most afraid of during that season of divorce while reading Alice Munro wasn’t about being alone. That I could handle. What concerned me more was finding love again, remarrying, and introducing a stepfather-figure into the lives of my children.

I’d grown up with a stepfather, and while I loved him and came to call him my dad, there was enough in my childhood to give me pause from wanting to repeat a family cycle. Unlike Alice Munro’s daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, who recently came forward with a heartbreaking account of being molested at the age of nine by her stepfather, that had never been my experience. Yet domestic violence draped enough of a shadow across my childhood for my mother to express regret in her later years for tolerating familial abuse.

“I don’t know why I thought it was better to be married than single with you kids back then,” she’d recently said to me.

Naturally, there was grace and compassion as I set aside annoyance at my mother’s old ways that mirrored Tammy Wynette’s classic 1968 song, Stand By Your Man. We both agreed it had been different times back then. Women’s independence was not as easily attained as it is now.

Munro’s choices, however, are an entirely different matter, one that is much harder to reconcile. According to Skinner, after telling her mother about the molestation, Munro sided with her husband, Gerald Fremlin. In fact, she remained with Fremlin until his death in 2013. It was the same year the author received a Nobel Prize for her short stories that featured themes of betrayal, infidelity, dysfunction, abandonment, and yes, even incest. Skinner’s trauma comes not just from her stepfather’s molestation, but also, and perhaps more devastatingly so, her mother’s betrayal. For a sexual assault survivor, being believed is often the first step toward healing, and to be denied that from someone whose very essence should be a place of safety is unforgivable.

Undoubtedly, Skinner felt the same, remaining estranged from her mother for nearly 25 years until her mother’s death at the age of 92 this past May. The family matter is a personal one, but the challenge of Munro’s legacy has now become all of ours. In Skinner’s essay last week for the Toronto Star detailing the molestations and its aftermath, she writes about longing for a time when she would never have to read “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.”

That time has come. The literary world is now trying to garner a new understanding while rethinking old beliefs about Munro. Essayist Claire Dederer writes in her book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma about the challenge of what to do when artists you love are found to have done heinous things while in the process of making that much-loved art.

“When we love an artist, and we identify with them, do we feel shame on their behalf when they become stained?” Dederer writes. “Or do we shame them more brutally, cast them out more finally, because we want to sever the identification?”

As a former status of women minister and a survivor, I’ve often espoused my unequivocal importance of believing survivors. The question then becomes, would I be a hypocrite for continuing to love the works of Alice Munro? While I don’t believe everyone needs to reconcile the contradictions in the lives of artists they hold dear before consuming their art, in this case, my answer comes easily.

My well-read and once loved copy of The Love of a Good Woman now finds itself at the bottom of a receptacle bin while I’m in search of a new literary hero.

Rochelle Squires is a recovering politician after 7 1/2 years in the Manitoba legislature. She is a political and social commentator whose column appears Tuesdays.

rochelle@rochellesquires.ca