Alice Munro
COVERS
“The Beggar Maid”
by Alice Munro
Friday, January 3, 2025
Why Alice Munro’s biographer left her daughter’s abuse out of his book?
Books
Why Alice Munro’s Biographer Left Her Daughter’s Abuse Out of His Book
An exclusive interview with Robert Thacker on the secret he carried for twenty years
AST JULY, the Toronto Star published Andrea Robin Skinner’s account of her sexual abuse, as a child, by Alice Munro’s husband, Gerald Fremlin—abuse that Munro, her mother, ultimately chose to overlook in her decision to stay with Fremlin. In the days and weeks after that revelation, one other name was added to the ledger of people who had betrayed Skinner: Robert Thacker.
Alice Munro Was Bigger than Canada
Alice Munro Was Bigger than Canada
Here artists are celebrated by virtue of their nationality. Munro showed me I could escape those tropes
IN HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH CLASS, I saw no connection between literature and nation. An author’s place of origin was a trifling bit of biography that rarely seemed relevant to their work: This is Will, he writes plays, his story’s set in Denmark, but he’s from England; this is Margaret, she writes about the horrors of the feminine experience, her novel’s set in dystopian New England, but she’s from Canada. Here’s another Will, who also hails from England. He has a book about a bunch of boys trying to kill one another on an unnamed island in the Pacific. And finally, Franz, from Prague. He writes about the nightmares of bureaucracy, and his fiction isn’t really set anywhere at all.
Thursday, January 2, 2025
“Home” by Alice Munro / Review
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| Alice Munro |
“Home”
by Alice Munro
from The View from Castle Rock
To consider “Home,” I return to Munro’s “Foreword.”
I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could.
Although this story is about her father, it is also, or really, about a daughter’s acceptance of a new reality regarding her father and regarding herself.
The daughter is living in the east now, about a hundred miles from her father. Unlike the past, when years could pass before she returned home, she now visits every few months or so. She takes a series of busses. The time it takes to get “home” is emblematic of reality. Things have changed so much that it takes real time to catch up to all the changes that make up her father’s home now. So, the beginning of the story sets us up for that – for the time it takes for a person to reach a destination, especially if the person is looking for the truth or looking to go “home.”
The scenes that begin and end the story both address the issue of time. But it is the story’s the ending that tells us we have finally arrived at the story’s original destination.
The last scene is a memory, one that she says is her first memory. She’s three or four and she’s out in the barn with her father, who is milking a cow. It’s dark. It’s cold. The milk hitting the pail sounds like “tiny hailstones.” This is the cow that will die of pneumonia the following year.
Alice Munro / Hired Girl / Review
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| Alice Munro |
“Hired Girl”
by Alice Munro
from The View from Castle Rock
In “Hired Girl” we see the casual contempt that people often have for their hired help. Alice is maybe seventeen and has been hired to do housework at the big summer cottage on a private island at Pointe au Baril.
The entire story concerns itself with how Alice reacts to being classed as lower than the people she works for, or, even, invisible. Several times she naively doesn’t realize that she is not an equal, that she doesn’t eat lunch with them, that she eats in the other room, that she is the one being talked about when her employer says:
So you just make allowances . . . . You do the best with them you can.
This story covers familiar ground to me. My West Virginia grandmother was a hired girl to an oil widow in the next town and learned some fancy ways that may have not been good for her in the end. But just like Munro says, everybody had hired girls in those days. My grandmother had hired girls herself when she had small children. It wasn’t that my grandparents had money — they didn’t — it was: what were families going to do when their daughters finished eighth grade? The girls were too old to hang around the house and too young to get married. So they were traded up and down the country side.
I was several times a baby-sitter for families whose means were spectacular. And yet, like Alice, I sometimes had trouble knowing my place. After all, I thought myself their equal or better, given how I did in school and what my ambitions were.
Alice Munro / The Beggar Maid / Review
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| Alice Munro |
Trevor
In the United States, “The Beggar Maid,” the sad story in which Rose goes to college and meets and courts, and then marries and divorces the wealthy Patrick, had its title taken to represent the book of linked stories as a whole. Outside of the United States, though, this book is not called The Beggar Maid; rather, the book takes its title from the final story: Who Do You Think You Are? At this point in the book, about halfway through, I think it makes sense to stop and look at each title as they work with this particular story and then with the book as a whole.
Wednesday, January 1, 2025
In the home of Alice Munro, a dark secret lurked.
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| Alice Munro, 1979 |
In the home of Alice Munro, a dark secret lurked. Now, her children want the world to know
Alice Munro’s husband sexually assaulted her youngest daughter. For nearly five decades, a conspiracy of silence haunted the family, and at times, tore them apart.
Updated
The sisters and Alice, from left: Jenny, Sheila, Alice and Andrea.
Courtesy Munro Family, and
In 1992, Andrea Robin Skinner wrote her mother, Alice Munro, a letter that opened with a warning.
My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him In the shadow of my mother, a lit
My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him
In the shadow of my mother, a lit
By Andrea Robin Skinner Contributor
In 1976, I went to visit my mother, Alice Munro, for the summer at her home in Clinton, Ont. One night, while she was away, her husband, my stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, climbed into the bed where I was sleeping and sexually assaulted me. I was nine years old. I was a happy child — active and curious — who had only just realized I couldn’t grow up to be a sheep-herding dog, a great disappointment, as I loved both dogs and sheep.
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