It’s 2024. *Surely* We Can Move Past the ‘Separating the Art From the Artist’ Discourse???

 
 

By sTACY LEE KONG

Image: Munro Family, via the Toronto Star

 
 

Content warning: this newsletter contains references to and descriptions of child sex abuse.

I want to start this newsletter with some stats: according to RAINN, the U.S.-based Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, one in nine girls (11%) and one in 20 boys (5%) will experience sexual abuse or assault before they turn 18. Statistics Canada has similar numbers: “almost one in ten (7.8%) Canadians [experience] at least one type of sexual abuse prior to age 15,” according to 2018 data that was released in the 2022 Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces. In terms of pervasiveness, this is not that rare. For comparison, 8.3% of Canadians have heart disease, 9.4% have diabetes and 10.8% have asthma. This is not a perfect comparison, obviously, but I think it’s worth holding this thought in our heads—almost as many children are sexually abused or assaulted as people who have heart disease, yet we treat one as a common public health concern, while simultaneously behaving as if the other is vanishingly rare. (And thank you to the person on X/Twitter who compared the prevalence of child sex abuse (CSA) to the prevalence of diabetes, which was so shocking to me that I had to go look it up myself.)

I’m starting this way very deliberately, because I’m going to spend the rest of this newsletter thinking through the way we’ve been talking about Canadian literary icon Alice Munro this week, and I want us to be very careful to remember exactly why we’ve been having those conversations. That is: her youngest daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, recently revealed in the Toronto Star that her stepfather, Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, sexually abused her from the age of nine to sometime in her teens. (The Star also published a reported feature that expands on Skinner’s difficult to read but necessary essay.) Worse, when Skinner was able to find the courage to tell her mother about the abuse years later, Munro chose to stay with Fremlin. She continued to stay with him after he wrote letters admitting to the abuse and characterizing it as Skinner being sexually adventurous (again—she was nine) and a “homewrecker,” and after he was charged and pleaded guilty to “indecently assaulting” Skinner in 2005. (Worse, as the Star reported on Friday morning, when an OPP officer informed Munro and Fremlin that he’d be charging the latter with sexually abusing Skinner, Munro reacted by accusing her daughter of lying and calling her names.) She stayed with him until his death in 2013, even though this meant Skinner spent years estranged from her mother and the rest of her family.

Unsurprisingly, the public discourse on social media and in various op-eds very quickly focused on Munro’s work—were there hints of her monstrous behaviour hidden in the short stories that won her critical acclaim, a Nobel Prize and legions of fans??? And, are those fans still ‘allowed’ to enjoy the stories that previously brought them so much satisfaction???

I… am going to propose we stop doing that.

As writer Brandon Taylor beautifully, powerfully explained in his Sweater Weather newsletter earlier this week—in which he reveals his own experience of being sexually abused as a child—the insistence on relating to this news through the lens of our own fandom also de-centres Skinner, which makes me, at least, very uncomfortable. “In grappling with the complexities of the situation, we allow ourselves to also be wronged and betrayed but Munro’s actions toward her daughter. 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,” he writes. “Many arguments about what to do with the art of someone who has done something bad seem to come from a place of wanting material retribution… What confuses me is when people claim victimhood or betrayal in a wrong that had nothing to do with them. As though your liking Alice Munro’s stories entitles you to emotional damages from the revelation that she abetted her daughter’s molestation and later refused to leave the man who did it.”

But there is no world where the ‘harm’ of ‘losing’ an artist you love equates to the actual harm done to a child who was sexually abused by a parent, and abandoned by all the other adults in her life who were supposed to protect her. So, read Alice Munro or don’t read Alice Munro. Love Alice Munro or don’t love Alice Munro. I don’t think it’s all that useful to ruminate on the ‘separating art from artist’ conversation in the year 2024, tbh. Instead, here are five other thoughts that this news cycle has brought up for me, and that I think are more useful to discuss.

What it means to be perpetrator of abuse

There is no doubt that Fremlin was Skinner’s abuser, not practically (in addition to Skinner’s own testimony, he took photographs of her and admitted to his actions in letters, which later incriminated him in court), but also not conceptually. It’s easy for most people to apply to term abuser to the man who crawled into a nine-year-old’s bed and “began to rub her genitals,” who “tried to get [her] to hold his penis,” who continued to expose himself to her, masturbate in front of her and proposition her for sex for years after. But there seems to be, for some people at least, an impulse to characterize Skinner’s parents’ behaviour as something other than abuse. Neither Munro or her first husband, Skinner’s father, Jim Munro, touched, or propositioned, or otherwise behaved (sexually) inappropriately toward Skinner. And yet, they were both complicit.

When Andrea told her stepbrother about Fremlin weeks after he touched her, he urged her to tell his mom, Skinner’s stepmother, who told her father. But Jim didn’t respond by talking to his nine-year-old child about what Fremlin had done to her. He didn’t seek out medical or psychological assistance for her. And he allowed her to go back to Munro and Fremlin’s home the next summer, and many summers after that. He did urge her elder sister, Sheila, to “make sure [Andrea] was never alone with Gerry,” but he also urged her and a third sister, Jenny, not to say anything to their mother. He never even spoke to Munro about the abuse. As Skinner wrote, “my father continued to have lunches with my mother, never mentioning me. I asked him about these lunches before he died. He told me I just never came up in their conversations.”

She never came up in their conversations. WHAT.

For Munro’s part, her response to her daughter’s heartbreaking admission, which came years after the abuse ended, was to centre herself—and not just by trying to protect Fremlin by calling Skinner a liar, which it seems Skinner did not even know. Of Munro’s response to Skinner’s revelation, sent via letter, Skinner wrote: “she reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity. She called my sister Sheila, told her she was leaving Fremlin, and flew to her condo in Comox, B.C. I visited her there and was overwhelmed by her sense of injury to herself. She believed my father had made us keep the secret in order to humiliate her. She then told me about other children Fremlin had ‘friendships’ with, emphasizing her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed… She said that she had been ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”

Horrific. Still, it’s kind of bizarre that I’ve seen far more people talk about Munro’s behaviour than Jim’s; he also abdicated his responsibility as a parent, and allowed his child to come to further harm, and contributed to her ostracization from her family, and just generally failed at fatherhood, so the narrow focus on Munro’s parenting is wild. (And more on that in a moment.) But also, believing your child was abused and doing nothing to stop it from happening again is for sure a form of abuse.

Taylor’s family similarly believed he was abused, but did nothing to protect him. In fact, for him it became a family joke. He talks about this dichotomy of acknowledgement and ignorance in his newsletter, saying, “I was so struck by how beautifully and with such clarity [Skinner] renders the experience of living in the aftermath not of unbelief, but the aftermath of ambivalence toward harm that has been done to you. I used to think that they were the same thing, but the more I’ve spoken to other survivors of childhood sexual assault, the more I’ve come to appreciate the distinctions between the two. When you disclose to someone and they don’t believe you, there is at least somewhere for the emotion to go. You can be angry at them. You can direct your anger at the concrete fiction they are trying to erect in place of the truth. But when someone believes you, but then goes on as though nothing happened, well, that is like drowning in quicksand.” (His entire essay was so sharp and thoughtful, and really helped me clarify my own thoughts; I definitely urge you to read the whole thing.)

Imagine being a child and knowing every adult in your life believes that someone has harmed you—and then watching them go on with their busy lives as if it didn’t matter in the slightest. What must that do to your sense of self? To your understanding of safety? To your belief in your own value, or dignity, or goodness?

And how could it not be abuse to damage a person’s spirit that way? 

Just for the record, it’s not ‘unfeminist’ to believe your child when she says your husband sexually abused her

Mothers, mothering and motherhood are concepts that are constantly litigated in our society, and leveraged against women who don’t adhere to some impossible-to-achieve standard of goodness. Though there’s no one definition of a bad mother—a term that can describe basically any mom people dislike—‘bad mothers’ are everywhere in pop culture, from the evil stepmothers in kids’ stories to awful mothers-in-law jokes to a literal horror movie trope. (And on that last one, in the 2013 book Maternal Horror Film, researcher Sarah Arnold says that in horror films, “the Bad Mother is… a multifaceted and contradictory construct. In some instances she is indeed punished for rejecting her traditional function of self-sacrifice and devotion, yet at times the very horror of the film can be found in the mother’s fanatical conformity to the institution of motherhood.” So, it’s true, there’s no winning.)

All of which is to say, I guess I see why some people have the knee-jerk sexist impulse to focus more on Munro’s behaviour than on Jim’s, or conversely but similarly, the feminist impulse to claim that focusing on Munro more than Fremlin is unfair or somehow misogynist. However, if we can be so fucking for real right now, Munro’s attempts to weaponize feminism to excuse her complicity is objectively bad parenting. Also? It is not ‘subverting your needs’ or ‘giving into the patriarchy’ to remove an adult who has harmed your child from your life, what the fuck.

What does it mean to be a family?

I’m saying this as a person who has always imagined a so-called traditional—which is actually just a Western middle-class—life for myself, in terms of getting married and building a family, at least. But like… where are we on what nuclear families are for? Because one thing that has become extremely clear to me as I’ve watched the discourse around Skinner’s essay unfold is how normal her family’s reaction was. So many survivors of CSA have spoken out about the same experience of not being disbelieved, but still being discarded, or deprioritized in their family’s attempts to protect the perpetrator of their abuse, or perhaps to protect the status quo. (Though the material outcome remains the same.)

I don’t know if I’ve read/thought enough about this, but there’s something striking about the way we talk about family, and how often we uphold that concept as something to protect in our pop culture and politics, when in practice, so many families fall far short of this Utopian ideal. I mean, what we’re seeing in the Munros’ family dynamic is not a tight-knit group of people who care for one another, but instead a system or structure that has more importance assigned to the way it is perceived by outsiders than how it actually functions for the people within it, right?

Who else was complicit?

Andrea Skinner had reached out to journalists before, trying to tell her story, and no one wanted to pursue it. (This didn’t stop them from asking questions though. Skinner’s stepmother, Carole, told the Star that “everybody knew.” Per the paper’s reporting, “She recounts being at a dinner party with a journalist who asked her, ‘Is it true?’ Her answer: ‘Yes, it’s true.’”)

Skinner also wrote to Munro’s biographer, Robert Thacker, as his biography of the writer was going to press in 2005, but he “decided then that he would not act on the information, for reasons including that the biography focused primarily on Ms. Munro’s upbringing and experiences, that he did not have all of the information, and that he did not want to overstep in personal matters,” according to the Globe and Mail.

Munro’s Canadian editor and publisher Douglas Gibson had also been informed about Skinner’s abuse.

And Fremlin’s conviction was presumably public record, though I can’t find any mention of it online prior to this month. This doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t covered; this could very well be due to the internet’s declining utility as an archive, and the fact that any coverage may not have been digitized. However. When the Guardian covered her 2005 collection of short stories, it made no mention of any allegations against Fremlin, only recounting the charming story of the three-martini lunch that sparked his and Munro’s relationship. And the following year, when the Literary Review of Canada reviewed Thacker’s biography of her, Fremlin is only mentioned as a central, and completely uncontroversial, figure in her life. Similarly, a 2006 Globe and Mail profile of Munro only references him in passing, and certainly never reports on his then very recent conviction for sexually abusing her daughter.

Writing in the Star, cultural commentator Stephen Marche argues that “the Skinner memoir amounts to a national horror story, a specifically Canadian conspiracy of silence, and evidence of a national pathology: It reveals so much of our desire not to tell stories, and the architectures of silence we build around that desire… The Munro story falls into a pattern that drives Canadian culture.” I don’t think that’s untrue. But I think regardless of whether there is a specifically Canadian conspiracy of silence, there is also the wider reality that this is just how abuse, and power, works. So much of the news coverage this week has positioned Skinner’s revelation as a long-held secret. But it wasn’t, not really. I don’t even know if it was an open secret as much as it was a deliberately overlooked fact, a thing that people ignored for economic, or reputational, or opportunistic gain.

This news cycle centres whiteness in important ways

And by saying that, I am referring to whiteness as socio-political construct, not a skin colour. Proof: so much of the cultural commentary that has been published over the last few days starts from the same premise: that ‘we’ Canadians—that is, all Canadians, real Canadians—loved and saw themselves reflected in Munro’s writing, which meant the Star’s reporting was not just a news story, but an opportunity for collective grief. But I do not see myself in Munro’s writing. Of course, I am interested in the themes she touched on over and over again, especially around women’s experiences and interior lives, but I also find myself exasperated that yet again, small-town rural Ontario is being positioned as the epitome of Canadian-ness, even from people who I know are the most dedicated city-dwellers.

Similarly, it’s not like her vaunted and “typically Canadian” interest in Canada’s geography translated to any sort of meaningful or sensitive depiction of Indigeneity in Canada. As Indigenous writer and journalist Terese Marie Mailhot noted on X/Twitter this week, “people really liked Alice Munro, but I personally thought her work was ignorant and almost segregationist in how her writing on rural life in Canada completely abstained from discussing Indians as anything more than dead and long gone. Like we lived close to her, she saw us.”

So: what does it mean when our national imagination cannot help but position Canadian stories as white, rural and deeply concerned with individual moments and individual characters, with seemingly little interest in excavating the systems that shape those individual experiences? I bet you the answer to that question will help explain why even this week’s critiques of Munro feel so hagiography-adjacent.

To go back to what I was saying at the top of this newsletter, there is a lot to delve into in this news, absolutely. But when we’re talking about how awful this is, it shouldn't be through the lens of how it made us feel as fans of Munro’s work. Instead, we should always centre how awful this was—and is—for Skinner, and think about the ways our society not only allows this type of abuse to happen, but also tries so hard to keep it under wraps.

And Did You Hear About…

The Cut’s thoughtful reporting on how Arab-American women are feeling ahead of the U.S. election, which mirrors a lot of how I’m feeling about political engagement right now.

Abercrombie’s shockingly successful rebrand.

Loewe tomato summer. (Relatedly: the TikToker who argues that as food becomes more expensive, the elite are going to use it as décor to flex their wealth. I’ve shared their account before, but it remains sadly relevant.)

The TikTok user who posts covers of songs that are sadder than we realized.

Rolling Stone’s (compelling, I’m not gonna lie) argument that all the new pop girlies are so fun because they were raised on Hannah Montana.

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MediaStacy Lee KongAlice Munro, Jim Munro, Gerald Fremlin, Andrea Robin Skinner