Margaret Atwood ‘shocked’ by Alice Munro’s daughter’s abuse in ‘Bombshell’

Novelist Margaret Atwood has revealed her shock at the revelation that her fellow Canadian writer Alice Munro knew her daughter was sexually abused by her husband – and later lived with him while studying Twilight Invisible.

“It was a bomb blast. I am surprised. I’m still trying to learn about it,” Atwood, multi-award-winning producer maid story and several alternative novels, informed The Daily Beast.

The literary world, like Atwood, is criticizing her in a similar manner after Andrea Robin Skinner’s excellent article. toronto celebrity The revelation of her abuse at the hands of Gerald Fremlin – and Munro’s lack of reaction to it.

skinner’s piece inside famous person The graphic years of abuse at the hands of Fremlin, Monroe’s second husband, who died in 2013. Skinner said the abuse first began when she was 9 years old and he would crawl into her bed while she slept, which continued until she reached adolescence. She eventually told her mother about it, but the Nobel laureate chose to stay with her husband instead. The controversy strained Skinner’s dating with Monroe until her death in May; The author had been suffering from dementia for more than a decade.

The revelations, just months after Munro’s death at the age of 92, have fueled grief over her legacy, as writers, radicals and contemporaries scramble to honor an essayist who ranks among the world’s most admired writers. One of the greatest practitioners of Cut Story. Writing in particular has been stigmatized because of its coverage of an abuser.

Atwood told The Daily Beast: “It was like a bomb to me. I am surprised. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. I’d heard a rumor about it but very few details, when Gerry died and Alice was in an institution.

“What’s remarkable to me is that Alice was from a small town in southwestern Ontario at a time when such things were naturally swept under the carpet. Now that we know about this horrific episode, there are clues at work – try his short story, ‘The Peace of Utrecht’ and the exposure artist in his novel. life of girls and womenand the short story, ‘Material.’

“There are many deep mysteries that come to the fore in most of his works. I once taught a course called “Southern Ontario Gothic” – the part of the area where Alice came from was once very Gothic. In Graeme Gibson’s interview with Alice among 11 Canadian novelists – which was published in 1973, before all this happened – two of them talk about how the area of ​​Alice’s upbringing was Gothic. There is much that can be said about Gothic mysteries and techniques. Crime in the Cellars. The person who was trusted turns out to be a werewolf. That was once Alice’s real-life background.

“I’ve seen the phrase, ‘Alice Munro’s fairy-tale world,’ but whoever wrote it hasn’t read many fairy tales. The baby abandoned in the woods. The girl who runs away from home because of the threat of incest. The father who stands back and allows the child to suffer is its basic purpose: it keeps the ‘family’ happy, at least superficially.”

Monroe’s longtime writer Alfred A. Knopf, his longtime Canadian writer Douglas Gibson and his former representatives at WME did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Award-winning novelist Barbara Gowdy told The Daily Beast that she was “very shocked and horrified to learn what I think.”

Producer, journalist and teacher Susan Swan told The Daily Beast: “I’m not going to throw out Monroe’s books, even though I feel she betrayed her daughter by not taking her emotional well-being into account. It’s a sad, horrifying, and all too familiar story, especially of mothers of Monroe’s generation, who typically needed a husband to survive financially.

“As a writer, Alice Munro earned a good living, but she still seemed to be working from the same old ideas about women. I’m upset and saddened to learn what happened to his daughter, but I agree with critic Claire Dederer, who said that canceling an unethical artist is a wasteful consumer gesture in the age of capitalism.

In an obituary for The Daily Beast published in May, Jessica Ferry wrote: “Perhaps no other writer has been able to write so richly about human emotions with so little explanation or interpretation about place, time, or people . Monroe assumes that you understand, and you understand. And just when you start to wonder, she gives you a detail so subtle that only someone who has made a career of observing people would be able to capture it: a moment that seems quiet but actually has meaning for us. pulsating with it, prowling our memories until our brains stop beating.”

Creator Joyce Carol Oates turned to X on Monday to acknowledge Monroe’s argument, and questioned why Monroe would blame “our misogynistic culture” for choosing to stay with the man she loved. – and admitted he was once an abuser. He pointed to the boys in Munro’s cut stories and wondered whether they were projections of the creator’s apparent subservience to men.

“Why can’t we discuss ideas, cultural trends, psychological motivations?” wrote Oates, who admitted in a major publication that he had not read Skinner’s article. “Is there no room for anything other than blasphemous speech? It seems that he has behaved very selfishly, cruelly. It has been said and said again. Such behavior seems surprising. So why not try to understand?”

Jiayang Fan, a personnel essayist ancient yorker I’m willing to feature a range on Munroe’s works, the piece I wrote on Should I change the way I teach him stories? This will happen and this won’t happen,” she wrote. “(Because) I don’t believe that writers—or the things they write—are ever meant to be held in high esteem. At their best, stories invite investigation. What is the relationship between the author, the infringer and the infringer?”

Some radicals have taken matters into their own hands. A fan posted a photo on X of his copies of Munro’s Reserve in the trash.

The poster reads, “As a mother, even I can’t do it.”