Oh Alice. What have you done?A bomb went off in the literary world this week. Its reverberations are wider and deeper than one realizes and will be undulating through media, publishing, academia and beyond for years to come.
Years ago, when Woody Allen hooked up with his step-daughter and was accused by another daughter of sexual abuse, it tainted his body of work for me. I was a huge fan, and he is far more celebrated and famous than Alice Munro.
People will argue that Alice Munro was not the abuser, but an enabler. I almost feel that is worse, or at least as bad. I'm not familiar with her work and I'm not interested. Like Woody Allen, she was able to work and be recognized because she let her own daughter be sexually abused by her husband.
I have no doubt she knew it was going on at the time in her own home. It's generous to say she wasn't told about it until years later, but that's bullsh*t. I was never sexually abused, but the thought of someone in my own home abusing my son fills me with a rage I cannot explain. Children are to be protected, period.
I have to agree with you Amy. Reading Andrea’s full account I also find it difficult to accept her mother didn’t at very least suspect. It was convenient for her to stay willfully ignorant.
My feelings are so complicated when it comes to her writing versus her mothering. Her callousness and selfishness isn’t that surprising after reading her stories. The women in her stories can be really messed up. In some ways it’s not really surprising and yet it is also absolutely shocking. It’s weirdly the same feelings I get from her stories—the but/and.
Amy, you said what I don’t have the language to say. All I can do is scribble stick figure stories. Because of my career choices, I’ve struggled with PTSD for years, even as I aggressively pursued treatment, but stories like this trigger a gut reaction in me.
When we returned from our last international work assignment, my wife renewed her friendship with a classmate who had enjoyed an extremely successful career as an engineer. Not longer after, the friend called my wife and poured out a heartbreaking story. The friend had just received a phone call from a counselor who asked her to come as quickly as possible to the counselor’s office. When she arrived, she found her completely distraught daughter with the counselor.
She was horrified to learn that her daughter, now a young mom with two children and a loving husband, had been abused by her father from kindergarten on, with threats that if she told anyone, he would kill himself.
With her world completely shattered, my wife’s friend returned home and waited. When her husband arrived home from work that evening, he saw her facial expression and said, “I guess you want me to move out.” The bastard immediately packed a few things and left. The next morning, my wife’s friend started divorce proceedings.
I felt the husband/father deserved to spend prison time for what he did, which can never be undone, but no such thing happened. People prefer, as they like to say, move on, so without any restraint, the bastard is free to live out his degeneracy. Even as I write this, I feel a knot of anxiety in my gut. Children are to be protected, and those who will abuse them must be punished severely.
I want to say more, but should stop now, other than to say that once children become part of the equation, adults have forfeited many other choices, unless there is abuse or unfaithfulness. Bringing children into the world, whether by choice or by “accident,” brings responsibilities that must be fulfilled.
I’m sorry to hear about your friend’s daughter Switter. And sorry for triggering you with this. Andrea’s story and all the memories it’s conjured has left me sleepless for the last few nights. Mostly because I knew I had to write about it and still somehow make it coherent. When it was all just a jumble.
My own early trauma plays a much larger role in my own PTSD than I realized. Although it was triggered by my work, the seeds were planted a long time ago. When no one protected me then it’s no surprise I cracked when no one protected me later. I just had no idea why my reaction was so overwhelming and felt so overblown. Turns out it was normal all things considered.
@Switter’s World , I am so incredibly sorry about your PTSD, your wife’s friend, and her daughter. I agree with you that adults need to be held accountable once they bring children into their families.
I understand there is intergenerational abuse and trauma, but someone has to break the cycle. I also know that when children are abused by their fathers, their mothers are usually abused as well. It may take a different for (e.g. verbal vs sexual), but I just can’t wrap my head around a mother not protecting their child.
There is nothing to be sorry about my situation. It is what it is. I chose my career and gradually learned there was a downside, but I chose to continue. I would have preferred a physical injury so people would understand and not ask why one can’t just get over PTSD, but there it is. Those events that I call triggers may cause that gut reaction, but more importantly, they trigger an even stronger sense of empathy. That’s the upside.
I ache for our friend’s daughter, for Alice's daughter, and for all children who are abused by the adults they expect to protect them. How can we help ease the trauma they will live with? How can we protect and intervene? How can we build a culture where abuse becomes less and less common? These are hard questions.
I could write volumes on your comment about intergenerational abuse and trauma, and perhaps will write those volumes. Who knows how traumatic experiences work themselves out through a lifetime. My own daughter, who seems to understand me better than I understand myself, sent me the following comment on Father’s Day last year:
I am thinking today about the men
who grew up without fathers, or with fathers who did harm.
Who then attended to their own
pain, grief, shame, and rage.
Who then become fathers themselves.
Who now shine on the next generation with their tenderness, self-awareness, and presence.
I am thinking of you because breaking a cycle is an act of heroism.
Happy Father's Day. (Dr. Alexandra H. Solomon)
We can choose to do things differently and can transform our trauma into change.
This has been very hard news to take. Abuse is awful enough, but it's intolerable that Andrea remained silent and isolated all that time, when her story should never have been separated from her mother's. The next biographer will start with this. The Thacker biography will be the one people go to for details about how Munro managed to make it to such a level of prominence from no knowledge or connections in publishing. (A month ago, those were interesting questions; right now, they are pushed to the side.) Someone else's biography will help us understand what happened in the family.
I'm sorry that your story has any overlap with Andrea's. That's a lot to unlearn. ❤️🩹
Yes. Very difficult news. I hope the floodgates can fully open and the next biographer will be able to get it right. Or at least more fully. Looking back now on Sheila’s memoir it definitely seems deferential to a fault. Knowing what she knew, I can imagine she was walking a very tight rope between what she knew of her family and what she was willing to share.
In everything I was reading about Alice, including interviews I did wonder why Andrea seemed to be absent. I was actually googling her daughters because it seemed odd to me just how absent they were. That’s also why this hit so hard. I was literally immersing myself in all things Munro as this news dropped. It immediately cast a whole new light on my newfound admiration for her writing. I had been such an excited student of hers these last few weeks. 💥
I did some mental calculations when I was reading the biography and thought it must have been unimaginable for Andrea, age six or so while the marriage was breaking up in Victoria, age 9 when her mother moved full-time to Ontario. It was understandable that she seemed not to have as strong a relationship with her mother as the older girls; being left so young seemed to explain it. It didn't. There was more.
In a way, Andrea's story came out at the time when the largest number of people would hear and feel it, so soon after her mother's death, while people were reading and talking about her. The impact we are feeling must be widespread: the rereading and interest and then this crash.
Tara, despite the verity, I do want an explanation of the silence until both her mother and stepfather were dead? Can that be seen as an act of what ...?
An act of inferring Alice's wishes and complying with them? I wonder about that, too. I am drawing inferences about Alice's character that may or may not be correct. A biographer needs to start all over with this information. To me, it's a tragic flaw that changes the whole story, going all the way back to Alice caring for her mother and to women and caregiving farther back in the family.
You nailed it when you asked how is this possible? Applying today's social consciousness to events from the 70's is difficult but what is not difficult is the horrific negligence of everyone over the last 25 years and all the opportunities (like every single second) someone had to speak up. I have read that shame disappears, or at least diminishes, as soon as it is spoken about and I hope this is true for Andrea, and for you Kim. May the courage of you strong women go a long way to healing your broken hearts and may your stories give hope to others who are feeling alone with a similar situation.
The comments on this post are very powerful and I echo every other reader to say I am so sorry this happened to you and other members of your family❤
Kim, I'm so sorry for what you've endured, and admire you for how you've come through it! I've never been able to get through a Munro story, and now I know why. xo
Thank you!! I have never kept silentl I have speaking up all my life and written several short novels about this: Since You Ask, Akashic Books, NY, being the most specific. I cannot understand how people can be silent; I feel I have been fighting for my voice and self since I was a child.
My own trauma doesn't involve incest or sexual abuse, but I have friends who have suffered this fate, and I have firsthand experience of maternal betrayal over many years.
It is infuriating, and unforgiveable, and hard to understand, ... only explicable by the unresolved trauma these mothers have been carrying themselves.
I fully agree with much of your comments, Amy, David, Switters, Kim ...
At the same time, we can be the ones to break the chain of trauma, which, perhaps, is the greatest privilege.
Oh, Alice... what have you done? I am just back in the States and only learned of the extent of this story last night. I have mostly been offline until then apart from a podcast. But wow... How many adults failed Andrea countless times? How could her mother maintain such blindness? I am in shock that her father would knowingly send her back into such a risky situation. I published my own Thursday thread about being someone's secret only by coincidence before having read Andrea's story. Mine was a bit tongue and cheek because I have sworn to never be anyone's secret or object of shame again for other less harmful reasons, but I can see how she must have been rendered invisible again and again during her most formative years before a world that wholly applauded her mother and that erasure must have been so psychically injurious. I can only think, what bravery all along.
Oh, Kim, thank you for your courage in sharing your own story. And thank you for these words on Andrea. So much tragedy lives in silence. May more of it be brought to the light of open truth. May this sharing and more bring you what you need to heal from the hurt of those who failed you.
I have very strong feelings about this.
Years ago, when Woody Allen hooked up with his step-daughter and was accused by another daughter of sexual abuse, it tainted his body of work for me. I was a huge fan, and he is far more celebrated and famous than Alice Munro.
People will argue that Alice Munro was not the abuser, but an enabler. I almost feel that is worse, or at least as bad. I'm not familiar with her work and I'm not interested. Like Woody Allen, she was able to work and be recognized because she let her own daughter be sexually abused by her husband.
I have no doubt she knew it was going on at the time in her own home. It's generous to say she wasn't told about it until years later, but that's bullsh*t. I was never sexually abused, but the thought of someone in my own home abusing my son fills me with a rage I cannot explain. Children are to be protected, period.
I have to agree with you Amy. Reading Andrea’s full account I also find it difficult to accept her mother didn’t at very least suspect. It was convenient for her to stay willfully ignorant.
Kim and Amy,
This wickedness will now be Alice Munro's legacy, at least to me.
Kim, I'm sorry to hear about your kinship with Andrea. More than sorry, filled with rage
My feelings are so complicated when it comes to her writing versus her mothering. Her callousness and selfishness isn’t that surprising after reading her stories. The women in her stories can be really messed up. In some ways it’s not really surprising and yet it is also absolutely shocking. It’s weirdly the same feelings I get from her stories—the but/and.
Thanks for your care and concern David.
Amy, you said what I don’t have the language to say. All I can do is scribble stick figure stories. Because of my career choices, I’ve struggled with PTSD for years, even as I aggressively pursued treatment, but stories like this trigger a gut reaction in me.
When we returned from our last international work assignment, my wife renewed her friendship with a classmate who had enjoyed an extremely successful career as an engineer. Not longer after, the friend called my wife and poured out a heartbreaking story. The friend had just received a phone call from a counselor who asked her to come as quickly as possible to the counselor’s office. When she arrived, she found her completely distraught daughter with the counselor.
She was horrified to learn that her daughter, now a young mom with two children and a loving husband, had been abused by her father from kindergarten on, with threats that if she told anyone, he would kill himself.
With her world completely shattered, my wife’s friend returned home and waited. When her husband arrived home from work that evening, he saw her facial expression and said, “I guess you want me to move out.” The bastard immediately packed a few things and left. The next morning, my wife’s friend started divorce proceedings.
I felt the husband/father deserved to spend prison time for what he did, which can never be undone, but no such thing happened. People prefer, as they like to say, move on, so without any restraint, the bastard is free to live out his degeneracy. Even as I write this, I feel a knot of anxiety in my gut. Children are to be protected, and those who will abuse them must be punished severely.
I want to say more, but should stop now, other than to say that once children become part of the equation, adults have forfeited many other choices, unless there is abuse or unfaithfulness. Bringing children into the world, whether by choice or by “accident,” brings responsibilities that must be fulfilled.
I’m sorry to hear about your friend’s daughter Switter. And sorry for triggering you with this. Andrea’s story and all the memories it’s conjured has left me sleepless for the last few nights. Mostly because I knew I had to write about it and still somehow make it coherent. When it was all just a jumble.
My own early trauma plays a much larger role in my own PTSD than I realized. Although it was triggered by my work, the seeds were planted a long time ago. When no one protected me then it’s no surprise I cracked when no one protected me later. I just had no idea why my reaction was so overwhelming and felt so overblown. Turns out it was normal all things considered.
@Switter’s World , I am so incredibly sorry about your PTSD, your wife’s friend, and her daughter. I agree with you that adults need to be held accountable once they bring children into their families.
I understand there is intergenerational abuse and trauma, but someone has to break the cycle. I also know that when children are abused by their fathers, their mothers are usually abused as well. It may take a different for (e.g. verbal vs sexual), but I just can’t wrap my head around a mother not protecting their child.
Kim and Amy,
There is nothing to be sorry about my situation. It is what it is. I chose my career and gradually learned there was a downside, but I chose to continue. I would have preferred a physical injury so people would understand and not ask why one can’t just get over PTSD, but there it is. Those events that I call triggers may cause that gut reaction, but more importantly, they trigger an even stronger sense of empathy. That’s the upside.
I ache for our friend’s daughter, for Alice's daughter, and for all children who are abused by the adults they expect to protect them. How can we help ease the trauma they will live with? How can we protect and intervene? How can we build a culture where abuse becomes less and less common? These are hard questions.
I could write volumes on your comment about intergenerational abuse and trauma, and perhaps will write those volumes. Who knows how traumatic experiences work themselves out through a lifetime. My own daughter, who seems to understand me better than I understand myself, sent me the following comment on Father’s Day last year:
I am thinking today about the men
who grew up without fathers, or with fathers who did harm.
Who then attended to their own
pain, grief, shame, and rage.
Who then become fathers themselves.
Who now shine on the next generation with their tenderness, self-awareness, and presence.
I am thinking of you because breaking a cycle is an act of heroism.
Happy Father's Day. (Dr. Alexandra H. Solomon)
We can choose to do things differently and can transform our trauma into change.
This has been very hard news to take. Abuse is awful enough, but it's intolerable that Andrea remained silent and isolated all that time, when her story should never have been separated from her mother's. The next biographer will start with this. The Thacker biography will be the one people go to for details about how Munro managed to make it to such a level of prominence from no knowledge or connections in publishing. (A month ago, those were interesting questions; right now, they are pushed to the side.) Someone else's biography will help us understand what happened in the family.
I'm sorry that your story has any overlap with Andrea's. That's a lot to unlearn. ❤️🩹
Yes. Very difficult news. I hope the floodgates can fully open and the next biographer will be able to get it right. Or at least more fully. Looking back now on Sheila’s memoir it definitely seems deferential to a fault. Knowing what she knew, I can imagine she was walking a very tight rope between what she knew of her family and what she was willing to share.
In everything I was reading about Alice, including interviews I did wonder why Andrea seemed to be absent. I was actually googling her daughters because it seemed odd to me just how absent they were. That’s also why this hit so hard. I was literally immersing myself in all things Munro as this news dropped. It immediately cast a whole new light on my newfound admiration for her writing. I had been such an excited student of hers these last few weeks. 💥
I did some mental calculations when I was reading the biography and thought it must have been unimaginable for Andrea, age six or so while the marriage was breaking up in Victoria, age 9 when her mother moved full-time to Ontario. It was understandable that she seemed not to have as strong a relationship with her mother as the older girls; being left so young seemed to explain it. It didn't. There was more.
In a way, Andrea's story came out at the time when the largest number of people would hear and feel it, so soon after her mother's death, while people were reading and talking about her. The impact we are feeling must be widespread: the rereading and interest and then this crash.
Tara, despite the verity, I do want an explanation of the silence until both her mother and stepfather were dead? Can that be seen as an act of what ...?
An act of inferring Alice's wishes and complying with them? I wonder about that, too. I am drawing inferences about Alice's character that may or may not be correct. A biographer needs to start all over with this information. To me, it's a tragic flaw that changes the whole story, going all the way back to Alice caring for her mother and to women and caregiving farther back in the family.
You nailed it when you asked how is this possible? Applying today's social consciousness to events from the 70's is difficult but what is not difficult is the horrific negligence of everyone over the last 25 years and all the opportunities (like every single second) someone had to speak up. I have read that shame disappears, or at least diminishes, as soon as it is spoken about and I hope this is true for Andrea, and for you Kim. May the courage of you strong women go a long way to healing your broken hearts and may your stories give hope to others who are feeling alone with a similar situation.
The comments on this post are very powerful and I echo every other reader to say I am so sorry this happened to you and other members of your family❤
I was going to start reading her work but f-ck that. What a witch. Seriously. What kind of awful mother???
Thank you for this heartfelt piece, Kim. Beautifully written and I’m guessing triggering for you. Sending hugs.
Kim, I'm so sorry for what you've endured, and admire you for how you've come through it! I've never been able to get through a Munro story, and now I know why. xo
Thanks Sandra. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. 🤦🏼♀️💪
Whatever doesn’t kill us better run! ❤️ xo
My specialty. 😜
Or hide. 🙈
Oh Kim. Thank you for sharing this. And I’m so so sorry. I wish you’d been protected. I wish the right choice had been made
Protection from abusers was hard to come by back then for young girls. It’s a sad commentary felt by too many of us.
Thanks for your care and concern Noha.
Thank you!! I have never kept silentl I have speaking up all my life and written several short novels about this: Since You Ask, Akashic Books, NY, being the most specific. I cannot understand how people can be silent; I feel I have been fighting for my voice and self since I was a child.
xo
That's it?!!
Thank you diving into this, Kim. Hard to write about and you do it with compassion and acuity. Thanks for your bravery. 💕
Thanks Mo. Nice to see you here!
Thank you for sharing Andrea's story, Kim 🙏 🩷
My own trauma doesn't involve incest or sexual abuse, but I have friends who have suffered this fate, and I have firsthand experience of maternal betrayal over many years.
It is infuriating, and unforgiveable, and hard to understand, ... only explicable by the unresolved trauma these mothers have been carrying themselves.
I fully agree with much of your comments, Amy, David, Switters, Kim ...
At the same time, we can be the ones to break the chain of trauma, which, perhaps, is the greatest privilege.
Oh, Alice... what have you done? I am just back in the States and only learned of the extent of this story last night. I have mostly been offline until then apart from a podcast. But wow... How many adults failed Andrea countless times? How could her mother maintain such blindness? I am in shock that her father would knowingly send her back into such a risky situation. I published my own Thursday thread about being someone's secret only by coincidence before having read Andrea's story. Mine was a bit tongue and cheek because I have sworn to never be anyone's secret or object of shame again for other less harmful reasons, but I can see how she must have been rendered invisible again and again during her most formative years before a world that wholly applauded her mother and that erasure must have been so psychically injurious. I can only think, what bravery all along.
Oh, Kim, thank you for your courage in sharing your own story. And thank you for these words on Andrea. So much tragedy lives in silence. May more of it be brought to the light of open truth. May this sharing and more bring you what you need to heal from the hurt of those who failed you.