17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
As a member of Canada's literary community I mourned Alice Munro's death one year ago. Then revelations from her daughter took me on another journey
In Canada's literary community, few stars shone as brightly as Alice Munro 's. When she passed away one year ago, on May 13, 2024, there was an outpouring of grief as well as appreciation of her legacy from readers, colleagues, academics and media. It seemed the ground shook a little with the passing of Canada's Literature Nobel Laureate. Months later, readers of the Toronto Star witnessed a different kind of response to Munro's legacy, this time from her youngest daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner. We learned that from the age of nine, Andrea had been sexually assaulted by Munro's second husband. And that not only did Munro not protect her daughter, she spent decades covering up his crime and taking his side. With this, the ground not only shook, it opened up and threatened to swallow Munro's legacy whole. Readers asked, how was it possible that an author who was capable of such sensitive and deft portrayals of the 'lives of girls and women', was also capable of such callousness when it came to the suffering of her own daughter? I too was shocked by the revelations. But I did not experience the additional sense of loss that many readers did, because although I respected Munro's achievement, I was not a fan of the work.
Up to then, I had been proud of Alice Munro as a Canadian who brought honour to our country, but her stories never did draw me. Despite her powers of often exquisite description, Munro's writing felt to me opaque, as though the stories had been crafted at a remove. They felt thin. The female protagonists often struck me as limp; resigned to what the stories seemed to say was their inevitable grim fate – a doom supposedly all the more plausible for being unremarkable, even banal. I felt as though something were missing; as though my peripheral view were being restricted by literary blinders; as though, as a reader, I were being asked to participate in the characters' passivity. I doubted my own perceptions and, from the time I was seventeen, would return to the stories every few years, thinking that as I became more mature, I might also become more sensitive to what so many readers cherished. I failed. I even felt a bit guilty – like a bad Canadian – for not appreciating the genius of Alice Munro. 'Oh well,' I'd think. 'At least I play hockey.'
