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.
The word “secret” seems old-fashioned here, or even slightly magical. These events were a secret only in the sense that when Andrea told people, which she did both before and after Fremlin’s conviction for sexual assault in 2005, they declined to publish the information or to pass it along. The first time this happened was in 1976, the year the abuse began. On hearing about it, her father, Jim Munro, failed to inform her mother and swore her two older sisters, Sheila and Jenny, to silence.
Jim and Alice Munro had come through a difficult separation, and the children were shuttled between their homes in Victoria, British Columbia, and southwestern Ontario. In the summer of 1976 Andrea was with her mother in Ontario. Her grandfather was dying, and Alice spent most of that July at her father’s deathbed, leaving soon after the funeral to teach in Banff. On one of the nights when she was away, Andrea climbed into her absent mother’s bed, where she was joined by the fifty-two-year-old Fremlin, who tried to engage her in mutual masturbation.
Back in her father’s house in Victoria in the fall of 1976, Andrea confided in her new stepbrother, Andrew, who told his mother. In patriarchal mode, Jim Munro did not speak directly to Andrea, leaving that to his wife, nor did he entirely believe his child. “It was just an embarrassing thing that shouldn’t have happened,” Jenny wrote this July in one of a series of articles by members of the family in the Toronto Star. “They wanted to forget about it.” The next summer her father sent Andrea back to Ontario with Sheila as chaperone, and Fremlin continued to expose himself and masturbate in front of her. This went on for several summers until Andrea hit puberty and he “lost interest.”
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.”
Alice seemed to think she, and not her daughter, was the victim of events. When Andrea came to see her in Comox, she was overwhelmed by her mother’s “sense of injury to herself.” Alice said Jim had kept the abuse secret in order to humiliate her, and she spoke of other children whose “friendships” with Fremlin made her feel betrayed. Then and later, her mother “was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.” Meanwhile there were frantic phone calls between Alice and Fremlin, who sent a spate of letters to the Munro family. After a few months Alice went back to him. The information had come too late, she said, and she loved him too much.
The feeling of the world clicking into place is something often found in fiction, yet sometimes in Munro’s stories knowledge, which can feel like change, does not change anything. The push for consequence turns either to the gothic, to death and disaster, or to disillusionment and repetition, more of the same. These mechanisms became more pronounced after 1992, but even in her early work characters absorbed terrible knowledge about themselves and others and continued on regardless.
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.”
Munro used personal material so freely that her eldest daughter, Sheila, could not tell if she had remembered something from her childhood or read it in her mother’s work. In Lives of Mothers and Daughters (2001), her account of growing up in the shadow of her mother’s talent, Sheila seemed to feel this also worked somehow in reverse: “So unassailable is the truth of her fiction,” she wrote,
that sometimes I even feel that I am living inside an Alice Munro story. It’s as if her view of the world must be the way the world really is because it feels so convincing, so true, that you trust her every word.
Her mother knew, however, that writers are not to be trusted. In “Material” (1973) a woman dreads reading a story by her philandering fraud of an ex-husband and, to her surprise, finds herself admiring what he has made with the stuff of the life they once shared. The story is good because it uses “lovely tricks, honest tricks.” The woman also knows that fiction has no moral weight, even when it is well done: “This is not enough, Hugo. You think it is, but it isn’t.”
As Munro’s reputation grew, the accumulation of stories using material from her life formed a kind of superbiography. Her frugal childhood in Wingham, Ontario, her early marriage to Jim Munro, and her failed attempt to be a “wife” provoked fiction that rode a tide of social change for women. Many of her female characters break from burdensome circumstances by doing something rash, which they fail to regret. 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.
It was all nicely middle-aged—and it is perhaps hard to look directly at middle age. Fremlin had never married; he had retired at the early age of fifty, and he invited Munro to live with him and his frail, elderly mother in the town of Clinton. This was a little underwhelming, if you thought about it (but you didn’t think about it), given Munro’s distinction, her lovely good looks, and her undimmed, writerly interest in sexual adventure.
Six years earlier Fremlin had been thrown out of the house of friends in Toronto for exposing himself to their daughter, who was then nine. There is no hint of such a person in Munro’s smitten description in a letter of March 1975, some four months before she moved in with him and Mrs. Fremlin: “He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing—grown-up.” Although she did not know about the girl in Toronto, three years into the relationship, while he was secretly abusing her daughter, Munro heard of another accusation from a local girl who was fourteen. Fremlin denied it, Alice told Andrea in Comox, when it looked as though her marriage had fallen apart. She also briefly suspected he might have raped and murdered Lynne Harper, a twelve-year-old girl whose body had been discovered in a woodlot near Clinton in 1959. This plunge into the gothic feels like something from her fiction, but according to Andrea they each tried to determine Fremlin’s location at the time of the murder: Alice spoke to her later of finding evidence that he had been in Alaska.
Oddly, the same mother who threw Fremlin out of the house in Toronto wanted to rekindle the friendship after she got divorced in 1976. Fremlin used a pay phone to call her because, he said, Alice checked the phone bill; she was so consumed with jealousy, it made his life miserable. It was this, rather than his known pedophilia, that scuppered her attempt to reconnect. The 1970s were clearly an uncertain time not just for sexual but also for maternal mores.
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.
Alice’s father and an elderly great-aunt were also in Huron County, and both required care. Munro writes with a lively interest about old people, who do not die in her stories as often as might be expected. This can be contrasted with the many, many deaths of fictional children, who rarely go from natural causes, as her own second baby did. Children are murdered by their parents, or they are killed by accident; they are lost in a moment’s inattention. It can seem an excessive punishment for being a bit dreamy, for “wooing some distant part” of the self, even if such dreams do sometimes turn to adultery and family break-up. Munro’s killing of her younger characters can feel a little uncontrolled.
In her memoir, Sheila Munro describes a woman who loved her children as people but who was uncomfortable with the role of mother. Alice was very pleased to have Sheila as a friend, especially in adolescence, when mother and daughter swapped clothes and shopped at the same store, a place called Sweet Sixteen. “There was a big problem about how to be an adult in this period,” Alice said of the 1960s. “I wanted to be as if I was ten years younger.” She was the cool mother who gave Sheila a copy of Lolita to read at the age of thirteen and who wanted to value her children for their “real selves as I thought them.” She seemed to understand, in a melancholy way, that the move from puritan to progressive values involved a vagueness, almost a kind of forgetting: “Let’s say I was thinking of the kind of mother I would be, not what it would do to you.”
“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.
This article upset Andrea so much that she filed charges against Fremlin, using as evidence the letters he had sent to her and her family, leading to his conviction in 2005.
The letters had been typed and copied in triplicate. One of them was to Jim Munro, and Fremlin seemed at pains to tell him what had actually happened with his daughter: “I pushed the covers back and let the erection show and fondled it.” It was Fremlin’s contention that Andrea was a “Lolita” who “invaded his bedroom for sexual adventure.” The incident left him disgusted at himself “for having been unfaithful to Alice.” Writing to his stepdaughters, Fremlin claimed Andrea had “brought ruin to two people who love each other,” and he talked of suicide. If “the worst comes to worst,” he threatened to “go public” with a number of “extremely eloquent” photographs of Andrea, which were taken by him when she was eleven. Sometimes he reached for a pedantic use of the plural: “The sexual event was largely in continuity with our pedagogical theory of treating children as persons.” Before the court case, Jenny sent copies to Alice, who said she had seen but not read the letters: “They were not addressed to me.” After this, Jenny did not speak to her mother for two years.
Munro was eighteen in 1949 when she met Fremlin at the University of Western Ontario; he was twenty-five and a veteran who had flown bombing missions over Germany. Munro considered him “something of a Byronic figure on campus, dark and lean.” Perhaps because he published comic verse in a college literary magazine, Munro thought he was the editor and brought him a story hoping “that he would immediately fall for her.” The year after he graduated he came with a girlfriend to a reading of one of her stories, which was about a man who returns to his hometown but cannot bring himself to leave the train station. Afterward Fremlin raised his hand to ask why she had not set the story in her own hometown of Wingham. Alice told Sheila that, to Fremlin, she was just “an apple-cheeked country girl,” but he really admired her writing, and the next summer he sent a letter to tell her as much: “A really, really appreciating, insightful letter,” she said many years later. “One of the best I ever got.”
A classmate described Fremlin as “the village atheist” and “a raging, unconventional guy.” When Andrea was introduced to him at the age of eight, he shot down her feminist argument that girls could do anything boys could and reduced her to tears. Afterward her mother said, “See? You’re so intelligent, he treats you like an adult.” Jenny Munro said she saw
the triangle of Gerry, Alice and Andrea as very close and jolly. Lots of banter and jokes, often sexual or scatological jokes. Gerry would encourage Andrea and Mom would feign shock. I could feel the tension and darkness there, how Mom seemed helpless to ever draw the line.
Fremlin continued to write comic verse in his early retirement, and their five-acre property in Clinton was decorated with novelty sculptures, including a claw-foot bathtub painted to look like a Holstein cow. His death notice in the Clinton News Record described him as “a philosopher, painter and poet with a taste for the absurd” who had friends “too numerous to mention.” It also details his war record in the Royal Canadian Air Force. From the age of seventeen, Fremlin flew thirty-seven operations as a bomb aimer, lying prone in the windowed front bay of a Lancaster bomber. In the course of the war, more than half the men who flew such missions did not make it back to base. There are two messages of condolence, one of which reads:
Uncle Jay was a favourite of his nieces and nephews as children. He’d round up all the kids and take us for long walks along the tracks. Fond memories of sleeping out under the stars while he told us stories, in particular, ghost stories, complemented by his spooky sound effects and “evil” laugh.
After Andrea’s revelations became news, commentators discussed Munro’s 1993 story “Vandals,” in which two young people unexpectedly trash a couple’s house because of the abuse one of them had experienced at the hands of the husband, Ladner, now elderly and in the hospital. The young woman, Liza, finds it hard to describe what had gone on:
In the secret life she had with him, what was terrible was always funny, badness was mixed up with silliness, you always had to join in with dopey faces and voices and pretending he was a cartoon monster. You couldn’t get out of it, or even want to.
Meanwhile she thinks that his wife, Bea, “had forgiven Ladner, after all, or made a bargain not to remember.” The point of view slides a little between the two women, as Liza considers a role that Bea might have played but did not: “Bea could spread safety, if she wanted to. Surely she could. All that is needed is for her to turn herself into a different sort of woman, a hard-and-fast, draw-the-line sort.” Sadly, “what Bea has been sent to do, she doesn’t see.”
This play of knowing and nearly knowing does not hang so delicately in subsequent stories. Consequences become more extreme, or they cease to matter, and the question of forgiveness is rehearsed over and over again. Ladner’s silliness can be seen in a number of Munro’s nasty male characters. As early as 1985, in the story “Lichen,” an adulterer (who sneaks out, like Fremlin, to make romantic calls from a pay phone) shows his ex-wife a Polaroid of his naked twenty-two-year-old girlfriend. He uses an “artificial” voice as he does so, one “that is rather high-pitched, monotonous, insistent, with a deliberate, cruel sweetness.” In later stories, this fakeness becomes more grotesque and inert (Ladner is a taxidermist): the paraphiliac mask hardens and grows cold.
“Comfort” (2001) tells the story of a widow whose husband killed himself after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. The man was an argumentative atheist, constantly on the lookout for the “dishonoring insult” of a religious reference, and the couple’s devastating fights left them “shaking with love, like people who…had been walking around in naked desolation.” The undertaker hands the widow a paper discovered in the dead man’s pajama pocket, and instead of a suicide note she finds “several verses of scathing doggerel” about creationists. Typically for Munro, the undertaker is an old, if glancing, love interest. They kiss, she asks if he believes in the soul, and he answers yes. This sweetness is chillingly offset by her interest in the way he has just embalmed her husband’s corpse. As he describes injecting formaldehyde into the dead man’s veins, she feels awaken in herself a “cool and spacious curiosity”—that slightly dissociative sense of expansion familiar to Munro’s readers as one of the pleasures afforded by her prose, especially near the end of a story. There is satisfaction to be found in not caring.
The work after 1992 contains many suicides. Home-wreckers of one kind or another come into private domestic spaces. There is anxiety about illness and old age, and a general shift into helplessness. Munro’s women, once so adept at betrayal, are now more often betrayed, and their own adulteries can seem a little pathetic. There are also stories of family estrangement in which mothers feel that they have been abandoned and not the other way around.
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 “Silence” (2004) a mother cannot figure out why her daughter has become estranged: “You know, we always have the idea that there is this reason or that reason and we keep trying to find out reasons.” She decides it comes from “something like purity” in her daughter’s nature, “some rock-hard honesty in her,” and we are left with the sense of a woman who feels both impure and alone.
Denial makes a great subject for fiction, but a poor mechanism. Some of Munro’s tricks, always lovely, no longer feel entirely honest. The writer must know what she knows, I think.
Munro said that her first storytelling experience was rewriting Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” in her head to give the mermaid the happy ending she deserved. In “Runaway” (2003) it is as though she rearranged elements of Andrea’s story to see what a different configuration might yield. Carla works with horses, as Andrea does in real life, and her neighbors are an elderly hippie couple. When the man, a poet, dies, Carla’s husband wants to blackmail the widow because of the poet’s lewd behavior on his deathbed: “You were injured. You were molested and humiliated and I was injured and humiliated because you are my wife.” Very quickly we learn that Carla invented these molestations as a way of exciting her difficult husband and also, a little, herself. This clears the way for one of Munro’s bait-and-switch plot twists. The widow helps her to run away to Toronto but, sitting on the bus, Carla realizes that she does not know how to exist with nobody “glowering over her,” and asks the driver to pull over so she can get out again. She comes home, the husband threatens the widow, and the couple are happy again. Too late, Carla discovers that he has killed her pet goat, Flora, and she pretends not to know this: “It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs and, by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it.” The story is too nicely balanced and surprising to be reduced, and yet if we do reduce it, we find the tale of a helplessly dependent wife and an elderly woman who has been too kind to a young fantasist.
Although the late stories can feel unprocessed in the psychological sense, some of them work brilliantly in part because of Munro’s ability to show how a character feels, even if we do not approve of them. In “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (1999), Grant, an old-school lothario, now slightly disgraced, feels he has been duped. The women in his life, at one time so suddenly available, are now saying that “was not what they had had in mind at all. They had collaborated because they were helpless and bewildered, and they had been injured by the whole thing, rather than delighted.” Although this line leaves a bit of a taste now, it sits properly in context—a comedy of geriatric manners in which Grant gets his comeuppance when his wife, who has Alzheimer’s disease, happily forgets him for another man.
“Floating Bridge” (2000) opens with the line “One time she had left him.” Jinny, who is sitting at a bus stop, returns to her husband before the bus even arrives. She does this because “the life she was carrying herself into might not give her anybody to be angry at, or anybody who owed her anything.” This man, Neal, has a sexual interest in the young offenders with whom he works, and she observes his covert excitement with forensic accuracy: “It would be over some boy at the school. A mention of the name in an offhand, even belittling way. A mushy look, an apologetic yet somehow defiant bit of giggling.”
Jinny has lost her hair from chemotherapy, but her doctor has just given her good news, and on the floating bridge of the title she is kissed by the young man who has offered to drive her home. The kiss is a lovely, transcendent moment, and it is also a little hard to believe. Do young men kiss older women on a whim? Martin Amis said he was happy to be kissed by Iris Murdoch; Edna O’Brien said she was kissed by Jude Law. But you know, I am not sure it’s a thing. No one in these stories is a celebrity, and this seems worth mentioning because Andrea’s suffering was maintained and made worse by her mother’s fame as a writer, which trapped her in the silence of others again and again. Her sister Sheila wrote that having Alice Munro as her mother was like “looking into the Grand Canyon.”
By the 2009 collection Too Much Happiness the stories feel altogether bare. A woman takes a bus to visit her husband who has murdered their three children, helplessly feeling “just as cut off by what happened as he is.” A son is estranged from his mother many years after a childhood fall. A woman, remembering a crime of her childhood in which another child was drowned, decides against seeking forgiveness: “It’s not for me. What’s done is done. Flocks of angels, tears of blood, notwithstanding.” In “Fiction” (2007) a woman reads a story written by her ex-husband’s ex-stepchild and recognizes her old house with a sense of foreboding: “She can feel the horror coming. The innocent child, the sick and sneaking adult, that seduction. She should have known. All so in fashion these days, practically obligatory.” The tone here is so unpleasant that the syntax begins to curdle. “Here was where the writer would graft her ugly invention onto the people and the situation she had got out of real life, being too lazy to invent but not to malign.” We do not know why the narrator is so exercised, because she is wrong: there was no assault either on the page or in life. In fact the young person loves her. It all works out well in the end.
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.”
This seems at odds with the lucidity of her sentences and her absolute control on the page, but Munro made few claims for herself as a person, other than that she kept her figure neat. From the earliest years at school, she was “just kind of a weird kid,” she told her biographer Robert Thacker, “being so nervous and so frightened, having no self-confidence,” while at the same time having “a lot of lofty superiority.” When Jim Munro forbade his children to speak to their mother about Fremlin’s abuse, he said “It would kill her,” and this, Jenny wrote, was “a familiar phrase throughout my childhood.” Also, Jim Munro did not seem to trust Andrea: “You know little girls, how they flirt and jump around.” The family mythology held that Alice was vulnerable and Andrea was a problem, and this was the disordered pattern that Alice Munro reached for when told the truth in 1992.
Like a number of anonymous online posters this summer, Margaret Atwood dropped a small question into the discussion: “I wonder if a similar thing happened to her?” She added, “It’s in the stories and so is that kind of abuse, in Lives of Girls and Women.” In this, Munro’s second book, published in 1971, Del, a girl of twelve or thirteen, is smitten by an older man, Mr. Chamberlain, and fantasizes about him constantly. He begins to assault her covertly, going “straight for the breasts, the buttocks, the upper thighs, brutal as lightning,” before taking her into the woods, where he masturbates in front of her. Mr. Chamberlain immediately leaves town—one of many such disappearing seducers—and Del does not tell anyone, not even her friend Naomi, with whom she has been having schoolgirl conversations about sex.
This configuration of two schoolgirls and the older man who seduces or assaults one of them is seen in other stories like “Queenie” (1998) and “Wenlock Edge” (2005)—with the irascible music teacher Mr. Vorguilla and the pervy Mr. Purvis. Munro liked and was influenced by the work of Edna O’Brien, whose book The Country Girls (1960) also contains this triangulation of two schoolgirl friends and an older man, called Mr. Gentleman, with whom one becomes infatuated. Del’s sexual encounter in Lives of Girls and Women is a world away from O’Brien’s picture of “two naked fools on the velveteen couch,” however. Where O’Brien’s girl is silly and hopeful, Munro’s is altogether prepared for degradation. From the outset Del conflates desire and damage, and she ascribes to sex a kind of truthfulness. His assaults are “a flash of insanity, a dreamlike, ruthless, contemptuous breakthrough in a world of decent appearances.” Driving her into the woods, Mr. Chamberlain uses a mocking, infantile voice—“Evil would never be grand, with him”—and derides her use of the word “sentimental”: “Sennamenal? I don’t know what dose big words mean, little dirl.”
Mr. Chamberlain is a veteran returned from Italy and Del is in her first year of high school, some years younger than Munro would have been when men returned to Canada after the war. Another veteran, in “Jesse and Maribeth” (1986), named Mr. Cryderman, served in Burma. While Mr. Chamberlain worked for the local radio station, Mr. Cryderman works for the local newspaper, and in this story the girl, Jesse, is fifteen. Mr. Cryderman’s interaction with Jesse is furtive, mocking, thrilling, and shaming, but the lesson she learns is a little more literary—if that is the right word. The reality of his touch makes Jesse see “the power of my own lies, my own fantasy. I am a person capable of wizardry but helpless.” He seems to understand that for Jesse people are “hardly more than puppets…serving the glossy contrivings of my imagination.”
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 am not saying that Chamberlain and Cryderman are the same character, or that they are based on the same person, or on any person. Conflating the author and the person, the life and the work, happens more often to female writers than to male ones, as though we are, in the business of fiction-making, more pinned to our inescapably physical reality. As readers we generalize very happily about issues of marriage and domesticity, but we individualize fictions of sexual assault, despite the fact that sexual assault, or the threat of it, is a universal experience for women. It did not have to be Fremlin there on the page from the very beginning; there was a lot of his type about.
In 1980, when I was eighteen years old, I walked into Munro’s Books in Victoria and was guided to two books, The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood and Who Do You Think You Are? by Alice Munro. 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.”
English (US) · 