Open Secrets Redux

It's been a tough week for Canadiana lovers.  We've just lost Alex Janvier, as I note here, and we've just found out that Alice Munro was, quite frankly, a monster who put her own needs far above those of her daughter, Andrea.  In many ways the news just gets worse and worse, in the sense that Alice had multiple opportunities to rethink her position, and moved from being personally hurt by the betrayal (but at least believing it happened) to completely siding with the abuser and denouncing her daughter as a liar when the police came to investigate the abuse.  Later on, after her husband, Gerald Fremlin, pled guilty and was prohibited from any contact with children under 16, Alice Munro complained that her daughter lived too far away for Alice to visit her and Alice's granddaughters (but without Fremlin in tow) because she didn't drive.  (This was the last straw for Andrea to become complete estranged from Alice.)  Andrea's biological father wasn't much better, not intervening when he could have.  And then there were all the people, including reporters and Munro's biographer, who knew and remained silent.  They certainly will have to decide how to live with themselves.

I'm used to separating the artist from the art, or I couldn't enjoy and/or appreciate Miles Davis or Picasso, just to name two of the most prominent problematic artists.  I do think recently with the rise of cancel culture, people are less forgiving these days, or at least they are until an artist they can't bear to lose slips up.  Still, it is likely true it hits harder when the artist with feet of clay (or indeed a truly terrible person as Munro is shaping up to be) is a writer, as readers have much more identification with the work and how it speaks to them.

I was just a bit over halfway through Munro's work, and I do intend to see it through, though unquestionably I will be more critical now that I know what a raging egotist she was.  But I won't be hanging onto the books I have read with perhaps one or two exceptions from the early part of her career.  I will not criticize anyone, however, who decides that they have to cut her from their lives.  It's just a sad, sad story that provides yet another example of how terrible some people are and how many others then fail to do the right thing.