What's so great about Alice Munro?

As much as anything, I became more aware of her as each Best American Short Stories annual, from the late 80s through the 90s, featured one and sometimes two of her stories, without a break in the run.

Would it shock y'all to know that Bret Easton Ellis thinks she's overrated?

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http://stcommunities.straitstimes.com/show/2013/10/18/ill-health-keeps-canadian-author-alice-munro-nobel-ceremony

"Short story writer Munro, 82, revealed in 2009 that she had undergone coronary bypass surgery and had had cancer treatment."

http://25.media.tumblr.com/aa3ee53eb18c9323f19043a1b81aab70/tumblr_mutvbot7CZ1qb4dbmo1_500.jpg

some of her stories so many of them really are like a long swim in the ocean you come out of them feeling refreshed & born anew

― polymath & psychics club (Lamp),

otm. I had a similar response reading the late story "Fiction" in one sitting this morning. Wow. She has a talent for drawing circles around circles, and when I'm afraid she's spinning away from the center she pulls the circles together and tight.

yeah maybe it was on this board where someone described her stories as kind of starting in the middle and then expanding outward like tree rings

the retail person in me wants to know more about alice in her bookstore days.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FXU1priUUAA3wHj?format=jpg

my eyes are terrible. i see james joyce.

https://shortstorymagictricks.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/munro-alice-1965.jpg

i like the peek at her shelf. i feel like i'm spying.

i didn't even see that she had died! well, i'll be reading her for as long as i live. don't know if there is more that i can say. i used to say she was my favorite living writer. now i don't know what to say! she lived long. she wrote good.

Just reread “Family Furnishings”. Not much happens. Everything happens. A genius.

"My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him"

https://archive.is/bYm7R

jeeeeeesus

Ugh. Munro has a story sequence in Runaway about a woman whose child abandons her.

She said that she had been “told too late,” she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.

fuck that is awful

the commonness of that dynamic doesn't diminish its horribleness. obvious who the real predator is but in these situations a victim who sides with the predator turns into just as much of one themselves. this sort of thing is close to my own family dynamic so unfortunately i won't be able to revisit munro's work. to hear that her daughter eventually was able to reconnect with her siblings, who reached out to her and confirmed her experience, fills me with great satisfaction.

as far as awareness about abuse goes, it does seem to be growing, and i think it's more possible than it used to be to combat it.

but in these situations a victim who sides with the predator turns into just as much of one themselves.

i should be more clear here, i'm referring specifically to alice munro in the role of an adult co-conspirator.

absolutely heartbreaking, she was failed by so many adults.

Not just Alice Munro, but also her father and stepmother who kept sending her back to the house every summer despite being told about what happened.

In the two directly autobiographical stories in "Hateship...", Munro writes about her tendency to bracket off and ignore other people's suffering -- so yeah, that tracks. Awful.

This is also the story of my grandmother. I told my wife about it and she quickly named around five other ppl in our lives who have been through this

Not having a single trusted adult to protect you - a truly horrific experience for a kid, with a lifelong impact. Idk if I can reread her work when I know this about her, and she’s one of my favorites. But this taints her work, for me.

feel exactly the same.

There was something particularly heartbreaking seeing an obviously intelligent person use the language of liberation to excuse her own callousness. I know this situation is common and eternal but "Expecting me to put my child ahead of myself is patriarchal thinking" is such a boomer flaw.

The daughter has written about this in the past. It's so horrible that Munro's reaction was to treat her daughter like "the other woman" in an affair. The daughter felt like Munro was not getting it and described the abuse in detail to her, and a few days later Munro told her, "I've decided to forgive you for what you said to me."

ouch. i was sad that nobody came to this thread when she died. so wasn't expecting this kind of revive. sad. life if sad for so many. i can totally see one of her characters not leaving someone because of something like this. she was enough of a cipher to me that i just saw her as the omnipresent creator in her stories. not someone i tried to match with her work. though i knew there were close similarities. "this person should run away" is something you could say when reading a lot of her stories. ugh. i don't even know what to say.

I knew nothing about her other than the late starts and periods of isolation.

The daughter has written about this in the past. It's so horrible that Munro's reaction was to treat her daughter like "the other woman" in an affair. The daughter felt like Munro was not getting it and described the abuse in detail to her, and a few days later Munro told her, "I've decided to forgive you for what you said to me."

― A So-Called Pulitzer price winner (President Keyes), Monday, July 8, 2024 3:46 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah this sort of thing is like... how abuse works. kind of a textbook case. i think alice herself was probably abused. that's how you get into these kinds of relationships to begin with. i mean not necessarily but i think that's often the case.

i think this particular piece, written by her daughter, is really powerful because of how it ends.

It seemed as if no one believed the truth should ever be told, that it never would be told, certainly not on a scale that matched the lie.
Until now.

there's this sense of battling one of the greatest storytellers and letting truth resound. lion roar stuff. i'm so proud of her.

ending the cycle is one of the noblest things a person can do

Recognizing it is a cycle is the first, hardest step.

the siblings seeking to understand what happened & get help to do that was such a moving coda too

yup

yeah, so many times that person just has to lose everyone, i'm proud of her siblings for coming around. that's three more people trying to end the cycle.

and it speaks to the power of the idea that you are not your parents. showing up for each other, or even the act of TRYING to is such a meaningful act of love but it takes a lot of courage

nine years old, wtf. all that "homewrecker" stuff is vile at any age, but at primary school age?!

The lineup of supposedly smart men who misunderstood Lolita is gross too: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/article-andrea-robin-skinner-reminds-us-that-monsters-lurk-within-classic/

I'm finding it darkly funny that of all the problematic/"red flag" 20th century authors regularly lambasted on social media, turns out Alice did something arguably more fucked up than any of them.

Glad Norm McDonald isn't around to see this

Read this: https://www.thecut.com/article/alice-munro-daughter-sexual-abuse-family-secrets.html

Really good piece.

Then there is a story I immediately thought of when the news broke yesterday: “Vandals,” published in The New Yorker in 1993, shortly after Andrea sent a letter to her mother outlining what had happened to her and shortly after Alice left the stepfather, then returned, and clearly hoped in a delusional way that this would all blow over.

In the story, a woman named Bea asks a much younger woman named Liza to check on her house while Bea is at the hospital with her husband. Liza goes to the house and trashes it, and in the context of the story, this at first seems so random that it catches you off guard. Then you come to understand that Liza was abused by Bea’s husband in childhood and that when she looks at the house and the yard, she sees “a bruise on the ground, a tickling and shame in the grass.”

Bea knows about the bruise. That much the story does make clear. “Bea could spread safety if she wanted,” Alice wrote. But to do so, she would need “to turn herself into a different sort of woman, a hard-and-fast, draw-the-line sort, clean-sweeping, energetic, and intolerant.” This, Bea is not able to do. This, Alice was not able to do.

I had never read this story. Somewhat curious now, perhaps for the wrong reasons.

A great story. Munro peaked in the '90s.

Right when she found out about this

this story from the Runaway collection might need a second look:

"Silence" – Juliet hopes for news from her adult estranged daughter Penelope.

yep, I mentioned it Sunday. Chilling.

is there a *least likely cancellation* thread? not saying that people are saying don't read her anymore but its so easy for people to just...not read someone anymore if they read someone negative about them. for some reason this is reminding me of the buffy sainte-marie thing. there were also old letters in that story. there have to be old letters if its an alice munro scandal.
that Cut thing is good at explaining why these things are so hard to grapple with. there is so much people don't know about families. and people will defend horrible people forever. you think you can't understand why but its really easy for people to do. even if it means losing a daughter. it happens more than you would think!

I was trying to articulate my feelings on this to my husband last night: I generally don’t really believe in the separation of the art and artist anyway, but when the “wrong” they’ve committed is so entwined with the type/subject of work they’ve done, it’s impossible for me to separate the two.

AM’s stories are these really insightful glimpses into the lives of ordinary women, and I cannot reconcile a woman who writes like that with a woman who would speak to and treat her female child in the way she did. So now I don’t trust her writing or how her writing made me feel, or what I interpreted from it. I can’t imagine rereading any of her stories without this knowledge just constantly on the edge of my thoughts.

Not sure I’ve explained this very well.