When Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013, the committe wrote,
You, dear Alice Munro, like few others, have come close to solving the greatest mystery of them all: the human heart.
Munro became a famous author because of her relentless interrogation of emotion, and especially the ambivalence of emotion. In her stories there is no pure feeling. Every emotion is undercut by contrary emotions, every pleasant moment shadowed by dark thoughts. Munro was often considered a sort of hero by other female writers, and some felt that Munro's Nobel was a validation of their own work, because their obsessions were the same as Munro's. One said,
We had won something, too, because of the generosity, the frank respect for the smallest and largest aspects of the female experience that she bequeathed to us all in her stories.
To Munro's biggest admirers, she captured better than any other writer the experience of women's lives in our age. Or, at least, sensitive, educated, middle-class women's lives. Which are, an outsider must suppose, all on fire with emotional ambivalence and weighed down with the toll it takes. Motherhood, in particular, came often into the range of Munro's artillery, and her mothers always resent their children nearly as much as they love them. She was equally ambivalent about romance. The men in her stories always pose a threat to the women, sometimes a direct physical threat but more often a more metaphorical one, to their emotional independence or their sense that they are capable of living alone. A man who does not pose some kind of emotional threat, it seems, was of no interest to Munro or the fictional women she imagined. Other fodder included the attitudes of children toward their parents at every stage of their lives, of friends toward each other, of people toward their home towns, and so on.
Lots of people wrote about Munro's family when the news broke last year that she had stuck with her second husband, Gerry, after learning that he abused her younger daughter, Andrea. Those stories were all rushed and vague and not very interesting, and I mostly ignored them. But now Rachel Aviv has written (for The New Yorker) a chronicle of Alice Munro's family life that is among the most amazing things I have ever read. The Munro clan, it turns out, were a whole tribe of over-thinking, over-analyzing people who wrote and talked constantly about their weird family. Aviv also makes plain how much of Munro's fiction was drawn directly from her family life. Between the stories, the letters, the interviews, and everything else we have a breathtakingly detailed record of life in this weird family.
To me the strangest part of the story is that Munro's children and husbands all understood perfectly well that she constantly translated her every experience to fiction. Anything they said or did was likely to end up in a story, sometimes altered but often not changed at all. As one of the daughters put in (in one of those many interviews), her mother was "putting every difficulty in her life through that machine that turned things into gold." Once she read her daughter's private journal and put those thoughts into a character's head – typical of the family that the daughter said, in another interview, "I thought my version was better." One of the children once described being on a family outing and noticing that her mother's lips were moving as she composed a story about their day.
When Alice introduced Gerry to the family, she noticed that her daughters responded differently to him. Of course, she put this in a story; "Roberta" stands in for Alice and "George" for Gerry:
Although Roberta's older daughter can't stand George, the younger one – "an acrobat, a parodist, an optimist, a disturber" – seems to have a special connection with him. "I know how be jokey," she says. "I understand him." Roberta shivers at this remark: "It seems to her that she has instructed them, by example, that he is to be accommodated, his silences respected, his joking responded to. What if he should turn, within this safety, and deal them a memorable blow? If it happened, it would be she who would have betrayed them."
This was years before Gerry abused that younger daughter. Did Alice see it all unfolding in those first weeks? It would not surprise me that she at least imagined it, nor that if she had that would not have led her to renounce Gerry.
When she discovered that her husband had sexually abused her daughter, she did not throw him out; instead, she used the incident and the emotions it inspired as fodder for at least three stories:
When Andrea was about eleven, Alice told Jenny that she was troubled by an interaction she'd witnessed between Gerry and Andrea in the back yard. "She said that Gerry was using a hose, like he was pissing, and Andrea was laughing, and she would grab the hose and do it, too," Jenny said. "And it just seemed off. It seemed wrong."
In "Soon," published more than twenty years later, a woman named Juliet dreams that, when she looks out her window, she sees her father and a girl playing with a hose. She can see that her father "held the hose low, in front of his body, and that it was only the nozzle of it that he turned back and forth. The dream was suffused with a sticky horror. Not the kind of horror that jostles its shapes outside your skin, but the kind the curls through the narrowest paggages of your blood."
So Munro hoarded that troubling memory and, when she fully understood what was behind it, put it through the story machine. Around this time she conceived the notion that Gerry was responsible for an unsolved rape/murder case in their town, and wrote a story in which a man very much like her husband commits the killing. (The police say he can't have done it.)
(The abuse of Andrea, as recounted by Aviv, involved lots of inappropriate play, some exposure, and a bit of masturbation, but no penetration; when Andrea reported it to the police, years later, and Gerry confessed, the courts did not take it very seriously and Gerry got two years' probation. I didn't find it shocking. But of course one of the things about child abuse is that the impact on the child varies hugely and many have been undone by acts well short of rape.)
The tabloid version of these events is that Alice "stood with" her husband rather than her daughter. That seems to be how Andrea sees it. But others who knew Alice cut her some slack because by that point she was already ill and losing her memory. She and Gerry depended on each other for practical support. They also came from the generation that gave us "sexual liberation"; it was not at all uncommon in the 60s for people to defend sex between adults and children as part of that liberation. Between this moral confusion and the constant psychologizing, it seems to have been hard for Alice to draw any hard lines through the world. She started from the assumption that all men are dangerous, all commitments perilous, and those closest to us who hurt us the most; from that position, how does one decide which acts are unforgivable? Munro's characters struggle over whether to forgive their parents for how they were brought up; she was regularly beaten by her own father, and she wrote a story about a girl who is beaten by her father but then lured back out of her room by her mother offering cookies. Did she forgive her parents? I can't say. All I can say is that she put those beatings into the machine, and out came a story.
In one of her last stories, Munro wrote.
We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do — we do it all the time.
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