The 2024 Abuse Scandal that Rewrote Alice Munro's Nobel Legacy

The 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature went to Alice Munro whose famous short stories did not disclose the scandal that in 2024 burned her reputation.

Scandal is the theme of the Nobel Laureates between 2010 and 2016. There was a scandal about the Committee’s choice of an American singer-songwriter and a Belorussian journalist. A sex scandal brewed inside the Committee. And there was the hidden abuse scandal of Alice Munro.

The seven winners of this period were:

• 2010 Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) Peru

• 2011 Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015) Sweden

• 2012 Mo Yan (b. 1955) China

• 2013 Alice Munro (1931–2024) Canada

• 2014 Patrick Modiano (b. 1945) France

• 2015 Svetlana Alexievich (b. 1948) Belarus

• 2016 Bob Dylan (b. 1941) USA

It still irks me that Dylan won the Nobel Prize, and you can hear why in my profile of these seven winners on the Burning Archive Youtube Channel on Sunday night. Or read my notes when the new Nobel Archive, the new home of the Nobel Prize Reading Challenge, goes live in November.

But my feature writer this week is the Canadian short story master, Alice Munro. What is the strange coincidence that links Munro’s Prize with my own story? 

Alice Munro Short Story Master

Before Alice Munro, winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature had written short stories. Many wrote brilliant stories, such as those of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) or Kenzabura Oe (1994). But Munro wrote next to nothing but short stories.

She became the master and innovator of the late twentieth-century short story. The Swedish Academy celebrated her as the “master of the contemporary short story.”

Munro dedicated her art to the short story. She innovated with form. She rewrote them constantly. She made them vehicles for emotional range and complexity. She is described as an “artist of discontinuity and disarrangement” whose stories often avoided clear resolutions or trite narrative endings. She devised ways to link the stories together as interlinked art. Many readers responded to her short stories as if they were novels, or indeed even sequences of novels.

Munro’s short stories reoriented literature from the heroic male artist and rebel male stranger to the ordinary, female experience of Munro’s readers. Tolstoy’s dictum served Munro well. All unhappy families are unhappy after their own fashion. Their pain seeded hundreds of exceptional stories.

She made her stories into artful mirrors of the experiences of women in North American societies. Fittingly, they were often published in that symbol of post-1945 North American literary culture, the New Yorker. After settling into the short story form in the 1960s she routinely published collections of her short stories as books every few years until the time she stopped writing in 2013.

You can read twenty of these short stories, free online without copyright paywalls here. 

Her choice of the short story also reflected her life story and the growing role of educated women in North American societies from the 1960s. She grew up in a rural area of Ontario, Huron County, near Lake Huron. She was a child of a school teacher and a mink farmer. She began writing as a teenager, and by her twenties she was married with children. Her writing continued among competing demands. She had many household responsibilities, but her publisher wanted her to write novels. But with little time, she chose short stories. In 1961, a local paper even profiled her with an article titled "Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories.” 

All the other educated housewives in North America and the Anglophone, Western world wanted to read those stories. She enjoyed commercial success. She won Canada’s top literary awards. She toured the world. She became an institution.

Many of Munro's stories were set in Huron County, Ontario, where she grew up. They investigated small town rural life as a kind of Canadian Gothic. She made the routine experiences, events, transitions and trials of the educated middle class woman exceptional, magical, and imbued with the modern social rituals and ceremony of an affluent, post-war, educated and feminised society.

A common theme of her early stories was how a girl came of age and defined the terms of engagement with her family and small hometown. Many later stories portrayed mother-daughter relationships. For example, the story “Silence” from Runaway (2004) presented the slow estrangement of a woman from her daughter, despite the woman’s belief she had raised her daughter well. Towards the end of the story, the mother thinks to herself:

“My daughter went away without telling me good-bye and in fact she probably did not know then that she was going. She did not know it was for good. Then gradually, I believe, it dawned on her how much she wanted to stay away. It is just a way that she has found a way to manage her life…. Penelope does not have a use for me. Maybe she can’t stand me. It’s possible. 

Munro, “Silence,” New Selected Stories (2011), p. 293.

Many readers, especially many women readers, recognised their lives artistically presented in Munro’s stories. The Gale Dictionary of Literary Biography wrote: 

“The reader’s experience in reading Munro’s stories is one of recognition. We say, yes, that is how life is; we recognize and acknowledge discoveries about our deepest selves. And this recognition is the purpose of the author’s journeys into the past undertaken with compassion and determination to “get it right” … [Her works] shift our perceptions of ordinary events and make us see the ordinary in extraordinary ways.”

That sting of recognition connects Munro’s life as writer to the posthumous scandal about Munro’s life as mother. It connects the title of the fiction, “Silence” to the reality of the accusations of Munro’s complicity in abuse. It deepens the sense of betrayal many express about the writer, who saw them, but refused to act against abuse.

The Alice Munro scandal

In mid-2024, only a few months ago and a few weeks after Munro's death, her daughter reported in a leading Canadian newspaper that Munro had failed in her response to a family sexual abuse scandal. The real-life estranged daughter, Andrea Skinner, reported that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her from the mid-1970s. The abuse began when she was nine years old. It ended when she was a teenager. Did Munro know? Did she see? How did the then successful author respond?

Skinner says she told Munro about the abuse when she was a young adult. There was a brief pause in Munro and Fremlin’s relationship. But no permanent break. Fremlin later pleaded guilty to sexual assault and received a suspended sentence. There are suggestions that the events were kept secret to protect Munro’s reputation as an institution - of Canada, publishing, women’s writing. With support from the publishing and literary community, the allegations about Canada’s first Nobel Laureate were hushed into silence.

The scandal has provoked book stores to withdraw Munro’s books from sale, professors to amend their curriculum, critics to condemn Munro as “no better than the miserable women she wrote about”, and even a few Substack writers to declare what they are “doing about Alice Munro.”

Silence has long been a weapon to deepen the wounds suffered by victims of childhood sexual abuse. After Andrea Skinner’s revelations, Munro’s story, “Silence”, about the inexplicably estranged daughter, can surely only be read with reference to Munro’s real life. It is an artful story. But is it a portrait of authentic remorse?

Commentators on the Alice Munro scandal have expressed pain that the emotionally perceptive writer let them down.  The Sweater Weather substack made this pain the pivot point to decide what they would do about Alice Munro.

“It is a means of resolving the horrible, unbearable tension and displeasure of the idea that we have accidentally loved someone who is, in the modern parlance, bad. There aren’t supposed to be any more bad people, after all.”

It is painful to know that you were fooled. To think that the great writer - who recognised you, in whose stories you recognised yourself - was flawed. She acted no differently than the priests of the Catholic Church, or the orphanages of Canada’s residential institutions, or the directors of Hollywood, or media stars of the BBC, or all the other institutions around the world that have responded poorly to childhood sexual abuse.

Many responses sought to separate the artist from the works produced by the artist. Our admiration for the art does not endorse the actions of the flawed human being who overlooked the abuse. The moral blemishes of artists are after all no less visible than those of Catholic priests. Even Nobel Laureates are tainted. Munro may have stood by her man to protect her reputation, even though he raped her daughter. But Andre Gide (1947 Nobel Laureate) toured the French colonies in search of rent boys. His reputation lingers on the basis of The Immoralist. 

But I find Sweater Weather’s response on “what to do about Alice Munro” unsatisfying. He loses focus on what happened to that child and mother in the 1970s and 1980s, and quickly pivots to the netherworld of cultural celebrity. He too quickly suppresses his shame to silence the victims, again.

In loving Munro, participating in her celebrity, in her art, we fed a cultural apparatus that permitted and indeed necessitated Skinner’s silencing. And if that is true, then, yes, I can see why people would be running like rats from a sinking ship, trying to fling themselves overboard, to get free of the knowledge that they had some small part in making a scapegoat of a young child. But I don’t think you can run fast enough or far enough to escape that knowledge. I think you should perhaps ask yourself why you feel such desperation to participate now in the victimhood you helped create. But I already know the answer, and you do too.

We might draw the lens back, and look more broadly at what really happened in the homes and institutions where childhood sexual abuse occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, before and after, in Canada and right here in Australia. Indeed, around the world.

Indeed, even within the Nobel Academy a sexual abuse scandal was brewing. The partner of the Literature Prize committee was exploiting or abusing many women under the prestigious cover of the Academy. The story would break in 2017 and lead to the suspension of the Nobel Prize in 2018. I will return to this story next week; but why are we surprised that literary stars suppress dark secrets?

Sexual assault and childhood sexual abuse were common. Among those cocooned in a ‘cultural apparatus’ and among many ordinary lives not featured in Munro’s stories. Shame was common. Flawed responses were common. Many victims suffered. Many suicided. Others lived on in pain not disclosed for decades. Many perpetrators got away with it. Many reputations were protected. Munro’s extraordinary story was shamefully ordinary indeed.

A better response to Childhood Sexual Abuse

Here the coincidence between Munro’s Prize and my own story returns.

In 2013 Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize, secure from the scandal that would be suppressed until 2024.

In 2013 the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Childhood Sexual Abuse began. Over four years from 2013 to 2017, it inquired into the many cases of child sexual abuse in the churches and other institutions, schools, government welfare services, dance schools, yoga centres, sports organisations and so on. Its most famous witness, Cardinal George Pell, became an international symbol of institutional silencing of victims.

In 2013, finally, the third coincidence, I began working on this Royal Commission that had an enduring, unusual and beneficial impact on Australian public life. It gave a voice to the victims. It healed their trauma. It cared little for reputations and fabricated ‘cultural apparatus.’

This Royal Commission found a way to speak in the most dignified, profound way about issues that are distressing and difficult. It dealt with many scandals like those hidden by Munro through a process that Martha Nussbaum described as ‘tragic spectatorship.’ This artful staging of difficult emotions was the foundation of the Royal Commission's achievement. It ought to be a resource for institutions marred by sexual abuse scandals around the world, even in faraway North America and Sweden.

I told the story of how that inquiry gave a platform to the remembered child who speaks of trauma in my book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Writing on Governing. I will read that chapter in my audio-mini that will be released on Monday 30 September. To listen to that story, and to reflect more deeply on how we can respond with compassion and nuance to the long, sad story of Alice Munro’s silence, please become a paid subscriber.