Last week, Andrea Skinner, the daughter of the late writer Alice Munro, published an essay in the Toronto Star detailing the sexual abuse that she endured as a child at the hands of her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin. I do not want to recount the details of that story here—it is Skinner’s and not my story to tell, and she has already told it. As difficult as her essay is to read, it is worthy of the world’s attention, and I would encourage you to carve out the time to read and reflect upon it yourselves. Suffice it to say that it is a maddening, heartbreaking account of how the adults in Skinner’s life failed her—not just her stepfather, responsible for this heinous crime against her, but also her father, who continued sending her to Munro and Fremlin’s house with full knowledge of the abuse that transpired there, and Munro, who refused to leave Fremlin after learning what he had done to her then-9-year-old daughter. “I was told too late,” Munro said, according to Skinner. “I loved him too much.”
I also do not wish to dwell on how this revelation—whose truth is incontrovertible, as far as I’m concerned—impacts the ways in which we read and interpret Munro’s body of work. I am wary of the kind of discourse that follows allegations like this, especially the forms that such discourse tends to take on Twitter, a website on which I unfortunately still spend too many of my waking hours. It’s not that I think the question of what to do with the art of people accused of terrible things is a fundamentally flawed or irrelevant one. It is, as far as I can see, among the central questions our culture is reckoning with these days and one without good or satisfying clear-cut answers. But it is far from the only question here—or the most pressing one.
Throughout the last week, I’ve found myself frustrated by the sheer number of people I’ve seen digesting this news by jumping immediately to themselves, how often a response starts with the person asserting how much they love Munro’s work, how meaningful it has been to them, how surprised they are that someone who wrote so clearly and compellingly about evil’s banality could be a perpetrator of that very same evil. It’s either that or an assertion that they’ve always found Munro’s work to be middling and lacking, as if she were a monster hiding in plain sight and while the rest of us may have been too stupid to see past the talent to the wicked deeds lurking beneath the surface, they for one weren’t. In either case, it reduces the harm that Skinner has endured and must reckon with for the rest of her life down to how it impacts us, as her mother’s fans or critics, as if this news of Fremlin’s abuse toward Skinner functions exclusively to reinforce or disrupt our opinions of Munro. “IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU,” I feel like screaming. “SHUT UP, GET OVER YOURSELF.” I have to remind myself that I’ve done the very same thing, that I do the very same thing, and that I’m bound to do it again.
I imagine that I would be reacting to this news differently were I a bigger fan of Munro. I have, really, no opinion of her, having read very little of her work. She is not beloved to me in the same way she is to so many others, and I have no emotional attachment to her writing—but I do to the work of many other writers, also accused (credibly, I might add) of undeniably horrible things.
I’ve counted David Foster Wallace as among my favorite writers ever since stumbling upon his work as a lonely, bookish teenager trying to figure out what to do with the feeling of being forever trapped inside her own skull. I was gutted when I read Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story, D.T. Max’s great DFW biography, and forced to confront the truth that the very same person to whom I felt indebted for a significant portion of my moral worldview was, quite frankly, a monster to many of the people in his life and women in particular—his girlfriends, his students, and his fans (to whom he once crudely referred as “audience p*ssy”).
For a time, I idealized Junot Díaz as some sort of epitome of non-toxic masculinity. I wrote half of my undergraduate English thesis on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and so spent large portions of my senior year tracking down whatever I could that had been written by or about him. I remember posting a link to some interview he gave in which he talked about the “political unconsciousness of masculinity,” and prefacing it with the very dumb, reductivist assertion that “all men are bad except for Junot Díaz.” Then in 2018, multiple women came forward with allegations against Díaz, ranging from verbal abuse to sexual misconduct. My first thoughts were not about those women but about myself: what would I do with my copies of his books? Could I still read them without guilt? Should I stop citing Oscar Wao as among my favorite books?
This is ultimately, I think, a self-centered, solipsistic impulse. Maybe it’s natural in some ways, given the extent to which these things seemed to be both hardwired into the human psyche and reinforced by a culture that encourages us to see our own personal good as the only real greater good—but I don’t think that let us off the hook. It’s a bad impulse nonetheless and one that we should be critical of in ourselves (though, as me writing this essay might inadvertently prove, it is much easier to be critical of in others). Put simply, there is a victim in Andrea Skinner’s story, and it isn’t Munro’s readers. It’s her, the daughter Munro deliberately failed when she chose her own happiness and security over her child’s safety and well-being.
Despite all of the recent tweets and think pieces about Munro’s behavior, all of the hand-wringing over how a person who wrote like this could likewise do a thing like that, all of the pouring over her body of work for some Freudian slip of guilt, her culpability here is really not a mystery. As Brandon Taylor writes, “She made a choice and justified it to herself through any number of inversions or self-delusions, who can say. But is this really so shocking? People do this every day …. People are capable of anything. Being a brilliant writer does not elevate one about the common smallness of being a person. To grasp for some justification as though there must be some brilliant dark inner turning of the mind that will explain it as opposed to accepting it as the everyday course of life… betrays a lack of understanding of human nature, particularly the one advanced by Munro’s work.”
Taylor articulates something here that I feel like I’ve merely been grasping at. Maybe what I’m really wary of when it comes to these kinds of discussions is the assumption that being a writer grants one access to some higher plane of truth, as if one’s ability to reveal through writing a certain troubling cultural tendency or aspect of human nature makes one able to rise above it in one’s personal life. It doesn’t. It never has. Talent is not synonymous with virtue, despite how desperately we may want to conflate them.
I do not mean for this to be a simple assertion that artists are flawed human beings just like the rest of us and we’re stupid for treating them otherwise, as if the culpability for an artist’s wrongdoings actually lie with their doe-eyed fans and not the person themselves. Munro’s complicity in her daughter’s abuse is abhorrent, and her cold indifference to a young child’s suffering is chilling—never mind that the suffering child was her own. The fact that she was a flawed human being just like the rest of us by no means justifies or excuses the harm she has done to her daughter, harm that her daughter has lived with for nearly all her life, which is far more pressing of a concern than how Munro’s readers are to now interpret her work. What this is, maybe, is a plea to stop elevating artists to near-mythic status, to acknowledge that good art is so often the product of broken people responsible for some very bad things, that their artistic achievements don’t render them immune from the shared human capacity for cruelty or callousness or selfish complacency. Writers are writers, not moral guides and certainly not angels. If we keep insisting otherwise, we risk alienating the ones they have harmed and are crying out for help.