As the news about Neil Gaiman's alleged abuse of young women hit this week, the great artist/bad human has been a big conversation topic in our house. I'll ask you this question: Do you think Alice Munro was addressing her own bad parenting and difficult situation in her writing, particularly in the snippet that you quote? It doesn't excuse her, and she is a woman who likely had the means to get herself and her daughter out of a horrible situation (when so many women have to turn a blind eye because they don't have that privilege). But I wonder now if she was working her demons out on the page.
Ilene, yes, I think Munro was working her demons out on the page. I have yet to read Vandals, the story she wrote soon after finding out what her second husband had done to her daughter, but from everything I've read, the story was her attempt to process it. Vandals was published in The New Yorker in 1993 (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/10/04/vandals-2.) Robert Thacker, a Canadian academic and author of “Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, said as much in this Washington Post story: "According to Thacker, it was broadly understood that Munro drew from events in her life for her 1993 story “Vandals,” about a woman who represses the knowledge that her partner sexually abused children: Those of us who [study] Alice, or have [studied] Alice, have always thought that this story directly connected to this whole issue.”
As the news about Neil Gaiman's alleged abuse of young women hit this week, the great artist/bad human has been a big conversation topic in our house. I'll ask you this question: Do you think Alice Munro was addressing her own bad parenting and difficult situation in her writing, particularly in the snippet that you quote? It doesn't excuse her, and she is a woman who likely had the means to get herself and her daughter out of a horrible situation (when so many women have to turn a blind eye because they don't have that privilege). But I wonder now if she was working her demons out on the page.
Ilene, yes, I think Munro was working her demons out on the page. I have yet to read Vandals, the story she wrote soon after finding out what her second husband had done to her daughter, but from everything I've read, the story was her attempt to process it. Vandals was published in The New Yorker in 1993 (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/10/04/vandals-2.) Robert Thacker, a Canadian academic and author of “Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, said as much in this Washington Post story: "According to Thacker, it was broadly understood that Munro drew from events in her life for her 1993 story “Vandals,” about a woman who represses the knowledge that her partner sexually abused children: Those of us who [study] Alice, or have [studied] Alice, have always thought that this story directly connected to this whole issue.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/07/09/alice-munro-colleagues-abuse/