Open secrets, hidden shames

There was only one life-changing writer in the Munro family

The recent shocking news about the Canadian literary icon Alice Munro revealing her despicable participation in child sexual abuse has shook the literary circles and the reading world beyond just Canada. Everywhere on social media there are many passionate discussions about it with people speculating on her behaviour: first leaving but then coming back and supporting the convicted pedophile till his death in 2013, and rejecting her daughter, Andrea, who had finally got a chance to tell her story in the Toronto Star. Some of those discussions revolve around the never-ending dilemma that rears its head whenever we learn that an artist responsible for beautiful and important things, might also be responsible for monstrous acts, such as terrible parenting. Michael Jackson, J.M.W. Turner, Paul Gauguin, all monstrous in their fatherly ways, all great artists. For women the dilemma of Motherhood vs. Art is well-documented with artists such as Lee Krasner or Elaine de Kooning rejecting motherhood in the name of art, or Louise Nevelson and Grace Hartigan abandoning  their children to relatives; many women artists lament the years spent on child-raising and having to sacrifice their art for it. It’s  In the book, The Mother Act, by Helen Reimer, Sadie, the protagonist, and a playwright says, “There are moments, no, whole days and weeks, when I hate my child. I hate my child and what she has done to my relationship, my life, me.”

Personally, becoming a mother, had the opposite effect on me as I suddenly found myself constrained by my obligations and became really aware and respectful of time, which in turn helped me to stop wasting it (time) as I had no such luxury. For a few years of my son’s early life, my day was divided into very specific segments where I wrote before anybody woke up and then after they all went to sleep (the rest of the time was devoted to baby, baby things, work, work things, house and husband things). I identify with Munro in that she did the same, the child-raising and the house and husband things and the writing. We learn now that she was actually truly good at only one thing, and that’s her art. Her husband things are a horrorshow: the first husband was a weakling who also participated in sexual abuse of his daughter by his silence, and her second husband was the abuser. Supposedly Munro kept a clean house and made a killer duck roast, I don’t know. Supposedly she was a good mother too, outwardly; Sheila Munro, her daughter describes a mother who loved her children and cared for them but who seemed to want to be somewhere else doing something else (writing).  

People are speculating about Alice Munro’s fiction now even more than ever — how much of it was autobiographical. I haven’t read Munro in a long time but I know she writes about women and secrets and domestic dread, and it’s all set in semi-rural Ontario where she herself lived. I believe there are also trains involved, or perhaps it’s just one story that I read that had a train. I read Bear over the Mountain, which I really liked. I didn’t stick with the stories for too long and maybe I’ll pick them up again but right now I don’t want to because despite knowing better, I will probably turn into Nancy Fucking Drew trying to find clues and explanations in the the way so many people are reaching out for them now (based on what I read on discussion threads). 

I don’t know why we are so obsessed with trying to learn stuff about the author when we read their fiction. A friend of mine, the writer Victoria Hetherington, and I always talk about how women writers are often asked if what they write is based on real life. Or how much of it is from your life? Hey, wink, wink, is Guy, [the misogynistic playboy protagonist of your novel GUY] based on someone we all know? This was at an editorial meeting with my former publisher who was convinced Guy was an ex of mine that he knew. Actually, unbeknownst to me, Guy turned out to be all of my exes as a couple of them got in touch after I interviewed about the book on the CBC (Guy is also really attractive, has a great body, and women really love him).

Right now, I’m less than two months away from publishing MONSTER, which I’ve called autofiction completely tongue-in-cheek and whose protagonist is named Jowita. I did this because I want to save everybody some time, being a girl writer I for sure must’ve written about myself! I also did this because I almost got sued (got a letter from a lawyer and everything) for the novel before that one, Possessed, because another ex decided he was in it (he didn’t even read the book, he is definitely not in it). The point of it all is that it’s not shocking that people are digging through Munro’s books looking for evidence and explanations, which maybe is a comforting thing to do, maybe it’s fun to shout “Aha! Found it!” when they come across something that will show Munro exploited her daughter’s pain and her own pain and that what we’re all reading is just a well-put together diary in fragments. 

Of course, real life makes it to books of fiction. Real life informs fiction. But I don’t know if many artists actually sit and plot stories designed to expose something about their own lives that deliberately. I’ve seen an amateur writer declare on her blog once how she was going to write a book to take revenge on people who wronged her. I mean, I’m sure that happens too, but even at a literary level it seems petty. And recently, a former (?) friend wrote, “I might write about it” when I made myself really vulnerable about something quite beautiful but private. It shocked me, broke my heart a little to read that even if it was a joke. It seemed cruel. 

I’ve seen some discussion too about Alice herself finding refuge in her stories and dealing with her pain in that way, by giving it to her characters. That I get, we do write to try to understand something out of life, to try to make sense of it. I do give my characters some of my feelings but much more frequently I give them the exact opposite of my feelings, this is what I love about fiction, that I can explore things which are completely foreign to me. For example, I’m strangely fascinated by stalkers and by extremes of romantic rejection and I’ve explored both of those venues in fiction even though I haven’t stalked anybody ever and it doesn’t take me that long to sit in limerence. Additionally, I can be pretty clueless in real life and I find some of my characters are way more smarter than me and they solve previously unsolvable situations. I love and I respect that particular magic of writing, the ability to think completely outside of yourself. 

I keep thinking about Alice Munro’s memoir and how a memoir is an act of courage. There isn’t a Munro memoir. It was not the genre in which she wrote but I also imagine she was just not brave enough to extract her dark secret and admit to being a terrible mother. I’m an artist who was a terrible mother. Not like Alice, but I too put a child in danger, I put my selfish needs first, and I wrote about it. I didn’t do it because I was particularly courageous although 10+ later I think I was and I’m less eyerolly about the word “brave.” 

I decided to expose myself to the world because I had this vague idea that I wasn’t alone with my shame and that I could turn it around and make something good out of it. My shame existed because it existed in a vacuum and it was choking me slowly. I knew that if I went on longer, if I stayed mute about it, it would eventually choke me to death. And having the ability to communicate it in words, I felt that it was almost my obligation to use those words as a weapon against it. I suppose Munro felt shame too, she must’ve (she did leave the pedophile briefly), she must’ve hurt terribly to destroy her own daughter and continue to destroy her. Maybe she didn’t need to write a memoir about it, maybe she could have dealt with it privately, give her daughter the sort of grace that Andrea gave her (if only by waiting to publish her story after her mother’s death). What I do know is that shame and secrets fester and that there’s no way around them until they are spoken out loud and brought out into the light to be annihilated. Alice didn’t and couldn’t do that. She didn’t and couldn’t because she was a coward. But her daughter did and could; her daughter showed a real act of courage. Out of the three writers in the family, it was Andrea whose story was the most powerful.  Whether her motivation was as she said to simply make people aware that this too was a part of her mother’s biography or not, I bet she’s helped hundreds, thousands of people who might be in a similar position. A real warrior, she faced and destroyed the family shame with words — something that should’ve been a responsibility and a duty of her writer mother. Her mother entertained and delighted the readers, she even got some special prizes for it, and if you jump in the time machine back to May 13th, you can read all about how her stories changed people’s lives. They don’t give out special prizes for what she had done but it wasn’t Alice, it was Andrea Skinner whose powerful words actually changed human lives.