The biographer's morality

Keeping secrets about Alice Munro

This week, we have learned that Alice Munro’s daughter suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her step-father, and that Munro not only ignored the problem but sided with her husband. I won’t recapitulate the facts (though I will add that the step-father wrote letters blaming the child), nor will I offer moral commentary. Others have done a better job than I would. And besides, the rights and wrongs are obvious and horrible.

But one minor matter of literary interest has arisen that I can write usefully about—how honest should a biographer be?

Talking to the Washington Post, Robert Thacker, a Canadian Academic who wrote a biography of Munro said that he had known about the abuse, but had decided not to put the information into his book.

“Clearly she hoped — or she hoped at that time, anyway — that I would make it public,” he told The Post on Monday. “I wasn’t prepared to do that. And the reason I wasn’t prepared to do that is that, it wasn’t that kind of book. I wasn’t writing a tell-all biography. And I’ve lived long enough to know that stuff happens in families that they don’t want to talk about and that they want to keep in families.”

Notice the key phrase there — it wasn’t that kind of book. There is a long-standing dislike amongst the more scholarly and serious type of biographers of the “tell all” genre that exposes secrets and scandals. It is thought to be unserious, unliterary, unnecessary. There is something tabloid about revealing such things. Too much sex draws attention away from the work itself.

What this story make clear is that these are a very confused set of priorities for biographers to work by. The long argument in the genre between telling the truth and telling a noble lie will never be resolved, but the Munro case ought to show us that not all truth telling is grubby “tell-all” biography.