ALICE MUNRO WAS A GREAT SHORT STORY WRITER…
But now it appears she may not have been a very loving and sensitive mom….
When I read the newspaper accounts of famed short story writer and Nobel Prize-winner Alice Munro’s silence in the face of her daughter’s sexual abuse at the hands of her step-father, several thoughts came to mind. First is the furtive pleasure of knowing that someone who’s so good at writing and so well-known and so successful possesses clay feet. We learn this outstanding individual is just as human as we are and possibly more flawed.
Second, we realize that fame and literary success are not equivalent to morality. Someone can be a super-achiever as Munro was with 14 story collections to her name and still behave abominably to her family. Maybe we knew this about guys (like Woody Allen) but thought women were different. It turns out they aren’t.
It also gives me pause as a writer to wonder what being a writer could contribute to amorality. It makes me wonder if being enmeshed in the imaginative story-making of different characters, sometimes in different time periods or different countries — might distance a writer like me from being present in the real world, being aware of the live people right around me? I’d like to think not. But I wonder if that sometimes occurs.
After all, where was Alice Munro’s mind and consciousness if she remained completely ignorant of her daughter’s abuse which, as described by her daughter, seemed quite blatant and occurred over a substantial period of time? And where were her feelings when her daughter confronted her with the information and she refused to separate permanently from the abusive stepfather? Did she honestly not care? Did she truly believe she could or should put her own needs first?
We know sexual abuse goes on in families. Do we think it doesn’t go on in the homes of creative people? We think of writers (artists, musicians, etc.) as being particularly “sensitive” — how could you write about others without any strong feelings, without putting yourself in their shoes? We imagine what the people we write about are feeling, thinking and caring about. We must care deeply about our characters — that’s one of the first rules of fiction writing.
But could someone care about their characters more than they care about their own children? That to me is a nightmare scenario. (It’s one that was also explored in the recent film Anatomy of a Fall). It’s bad enough that we writers (and other artists) sacrifice time with family and friends to devote ourselves to our work. It’s true that we’re often self-absorbed to the point of ignoring or denying problems in our home or immediate surroundings. But to actually learn about a major issue of abuse affecting someone we (presumably) love, like a daughter, and deny its importance and the pain that it’s causing, that I find difficult, even horrible, to contemplate.
As writers, it’s worth asking ourselves to what extent our writing could put a barrier between us and various issues pertaining to family members or the neighborhood or the community or the world — issues that we’re conveniently ignoring. Even when we choose to write about these same subjects; even when it appears we’re exploring them deeply, are we really doing that or are we keeping ourselves aloof in the writer mode — telling about or explaining about rather than living it, being present to it and accepting the consequences.
It’s worth honestly questioning ourselves, isn’t it?
