It’s a compliment to James Tussing that I just read his long piece on Alice Munro and feel sick to my soul. He writes: “If staying with a child-abuser husband is sadly typical behavior, writing icily unsentimental stories inspired by your decision to do so is not. If Fremlin’s behavior was normal at least from the perspective of criminal psychopa thology, Munro’s is harder to fathom.”
At some point I’ll write about Munro in detail but not yet. My thoughts about her are unclear to me still. I have given up on Helen Garner’s much-praised diaries for instance because her passivity in the company of awful men reminds me somewhat of Munro. I have a horror of leftover 1960s people with vile attitudes towards children that bled over into the 1970s. These two are the essence of it.
It really is a fascinating assessment of Munro and does not let her off the hook at all. My god, her daughter Andrea Skinner is a brave woman. I wouldn’t have survived a mother like that.
Thank you very much for this comment. Unlike other articles that have recently been written about Munro, I wanted mine to focus on her writing, and to use the details of what happened in her family to illuminate her art, instead of the other way around.
This seemed necessary and I felt other writers hadn't done it. Of course for this reason the article is a tribute to Munro the writer: a different sort of artist than she was taken to be, but still a very great artist.
I'm glad that you didn't think I'd let her the hook as a human being, because I did worry about leaving that impression. When you write an academic article the natural fear is that nobody will read it, but I was also always thinking in the back of my head "what would Andrea Skinner think if she read this?"
I thought it was wonderfully comprehensive about every aspect of Munro’s life and work, however much Munro may have wanted to conceal her personal abjectness from readers and critics. This is why I’m on Substack; I hope this site will let people link to writing that goes very deep.
Thank you for the read. I’ll study it again when I can find the ability to get back in the rat hole, as Margaret Drabble referred to the effect of writing a novel about her mother. You just come out smelling of rat, which was a good way of describing the feeling. The remark always made me wonder about people being so initially keen to write memoirs.
It’s a compliment to James Tussing that I just read his long piece on Alice Munro and feel sick to my soul. He writes: “If staying with a child-abuser husband is sadly typical behavior, writing icily unsentimental stories inspired by your decision to do so is not. If Fremlin’s behavior was normal at least from the perspective of criminal psychopa thology, Munro’s is harder to fathom.”
At some point I’ll write about Munro in detail but not yet. My thoughts about her are unclear to me still. I have given up on Helen Garner’s much-praised diaries for instance because her passivity in the company of awful men reminds me somewhat of Munro. I have a horror of leftover 1960s people with vile attitudes towards children that bled over into the 1970s. These two are the essence of it.
It really is a fascinating assessment of Munro and does not let her off the hook at all. My god, her daughter Andrea Skinner is a brave woman. I wouldn’t have survived a mother like that.
Thank you very much for this comment. Unlike other articles that have recently been written about Munro, I wanted mine to focus on her writing, and to use the details of what happened in her family to illuminate her art, instead of the other way around.
This seemed necessary and I felt other writers hadn't done it. Of course for this reason the article is a tribute to Munro the writer: a different sort of artist than she was taken to be, but still a very great artist.
I'm glad that you didn't think I'd let her the hook as a human being, because I did worry about leaving that impression. When you write an academic article the natural fear is that nobody will read it, but I was also always thinking in the back of my head "what would Andrea Skinner think if she read this?"
I thought it was wonderfully comprehensive about every aspect of Munro’s life and work, however much Munro may have wanted to conceal her personal abjectness from readers and critics. This is why I’m on Substack; I hope this site will let people link to writing that goes very deep.
Thank you for the read. I’ll study it again when I can find the ability to get back in the rat hole, as Margaret Drabble referred to the effect of writing a novel about her mother. You just come out smelling of rat, which was a good way of describing the feeling. The remark always made me wonder about people being so initially keen to write memoirs.
Great article, thanks for the link! So refreshing to read such clear and engaging writing in an academic journal.
Agreed!
Thanks!